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The Voice of the People

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow · English · Gutenberg #16505 · 625,185 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Voice of the People

Author: Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow


        
Release date: August 10, 2005 [eBook #16505]
                Most recently updated: December 12, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE ***




Produced by Suzanne Shell, Ed Casulli and the Online
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR

"THE DESCENDANT"

AND

"PHASES OF AN INFERIOR PLANET"


CROWNED MASTERPIECES OF MODERN FICTION

SPECIAL SUBSCRIPTION EDITION



The Voice of the People


BY

Ellen Glasgow



NEW YORK, DOUBLEDAY
PAGE & COMPANY, 1904

Copyright, 1900, by
ELLEN GLASGOW

Published September, 1902



TO REBE GORDON GLASGOW





THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE




BOOK I

FAIR WEATHER AT KINGSBOROUGH




I


The last day of Circuit Court was over at Kingsborough.

The jury had vanished from the semicircle of straight-backed chairs in
the old court-house, the clerk had laid aside his pen along with his air
of listless attention, and the judge was making his way through the
straggling spectators to the sunken stone steps of the platform outside.
As the crowd in the doorway parted slightly, a breeze passed into the
room, scattering the odours of bad tobacco and farm-stained clothing.
The sound of a cow-bell came through one of the small windows, from the
green beyond, where a red-and-white cow was browsing among the
buttercups.

"A fine day, gentlemen," said the judge, bowing to right and left. "A
fine day."

He moved slowly, fanning himself absently with his white straw hat,
pausing from time to time to exchange a word of greeting--secure in the
affability of one who is not only a judge of man but a Bassett of
Virginia. From his classic head to his ill-fitting boots he upheld the
traditions of his office and his race.

On the stone platform, just beyond the entrance, he stopped to speak to
a lawyer from a neighbouring county. Then, as a clump of men scattered
at his approach, he waved them together with a bland, benedictory
gesture which descended alike upon the high and the low, upon the rector
of the old church up the street, in his rusty black, and upon the
red-haired, raw-boned farmer with his streaming brow.

"Glad to see you out, sir," he said to the one, and to the other, "How
are you, Burr? Time the crops were in the ground, isn't it?"

Burr mumbled a confused reply, wiping his neck laboriously on his red
cotton handkerchief.

"The corn's been planted goin' on six weeks," he said more distinctly,
ejecting his words between mouthfuls of tobacco juice as if they were
pebbles which obstructed his speech. "I al'ays stick to plantin' yo'
corn when the hickory leaf's as big as a squirrel's ear. If you don't,
the luck's agin you."

"An' whar thar's growin' corn thar's a sight o' hoein'," put in an
alert, nervous-looking countryman. "If I lay my hoe down for a spell,
the weeds git so big I can't find the crop."

Amos Burr nodded with slow emphasis: "I never see land take so natural
to weeds nohow as mine do," he said. "When you raise peanuts you're
raisin' trouble."

He was a lean, overworked man, with knotted hands the colour of the
soil he tilled and an inanely honest face, over which the freckles
showed like splashes of mud freshly dried. As he spoke he gave his blue
jean trousers an abrupt hitch at the belt.

"Dear me! Dear me!" returned the judge with absent-minded, habitual
friendliness, smiling his rich, beneficent smile. Then, as he caught
sight of a smaller red head beneath Burr's arm, he added: "You've a
right-hand man coming on, I see. What's your name, my boy?"

The boy squirmed on his bare, brown feet and wriggled his head from
beneath his father's arm. He did not answer, but he turned his bright
eyes on the judge and flushed through all the freckles of his ugly
little face.

"Nick--that is, Nicholas, sir," replied the elder Burr with an
apologetic cough, due to the insignificance of the subject. "Yes, sir,
he's leetle, but he's plum full of grit. He can beat any nigger I ever
seed at the plough. He'd outplough me if he war a head taller."

"That will mend," remarked the lawyer from the neighbouring county with
facetious intention. "A boy and a beanstalk will grow, you know. There's
no helping it."

"Oh, he'll be a man soon enough," added the judge, his gaze passing over
the large, red head to rest upon the small one, "and a farmer like his
father before him, I suppose."

He was turning away when the child's voice checked him, and he paused.

"I--I'd ruther be a judge," said the boy.

He was leaning against the faded bricks of the old court-house, one
sunburned hand playing nervously with the crumbling particles. His
honest little face was as red as his hair.

The judge started.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, and he looked at the child with his kindly eyes. The
boy was ugly, lean, and stunted in growth, browned by hot suns and
powdered by the dust of country roads, but his eyes caught the gaze of
the judge and held it.

Above his head, on the brick wall, a board was nailed, bearing in black
marking the name of the white-sand street which stretched like a
chalk-drawn line from the grass-grown battlefields to the pale old
buildings of King's College. The street had been called in honour of a
duke of Gloucester. It was now "Main" Street, and nothing more, though
it was still wide and white and placidly impressed by the slow passage
of Kingsborough feet. Beyond the court-house the breeze blew across the
green, which was ablaze with buttercups. Beneath the warm wind the
yellow heads assumed the effect of a brilliant tangle, spreading over
the unploughed common, running astray in the grass-lined ditch that
bordered the walk, hiding beneath dusty-leaved plants in unsuspected
hollows, and breaking out again under the horses' hoofs in the sandy
street.

"Ah!" exclaimed the judge, and a good-natured laugh ran round the group.

"Wall, I never!" ejaculated the elder Burr, but there was no surprise in
his tone; it expressed rather the helplessness of paternity.

The boy faced them, pressing more firmly against the bricks.

"There ain't nothin' in peanut-raisin'," he said. "It's jest farmin' fur
crows. I'd ruther be a judge."

The judge laughed and turned from him.

"Stick to the soil, my boy," he advised. "Stick to the soil. It is the
best thing to do. But if you choose the second best, and I can help you,
I will--I will, upon my word--Ah! General," to a jovial-faced,
wide-girthed gentleman in a brown linen coat, "I'm glad to see you in
town. Fine weather!"

He put on his hat, bowed again, and went on his way.

He passed slowly along in the spring sunshine, his feet crunching upon
the gravel, his straight shadow falling upon the white level between
coarse fringes of wire-grass. Far up the town, at the street's sudden
end, where it was lost in diverging roads, there was visible, as through
a film of bluish smoke, the verdigris-green foliage of King's College.
Nearer at hand the solemn cruciform of the old church was steeped in
shade, the high bell-tower dropping a veil of English ivy as it rose
against the sky. Through the rusty iron gate of the graveyard the marble
slabs glimmered beneath submerging grasses, long, pale, tremulous like
reeds.

The grass-grown walk beside the low brick wall of the churchyard led on
to the judge's own garden, a square enclosure, laid out in straight
vegetable rows, marked off by variegated borders of flowering
plants--heartsease, foxglove, and the red-lidded eyes of scarlet
poppies. Beyond the feathery green of the asparagus bed there was a bush
of flowering syringa, another at the beginning of the grass-trimmed
walk, and yet another brushing the large white pillars of the square
front porch--their slender sprays blown from sun to shade like
fluttering streamers of cream-coloured ribbons. On the other side there
were lilacs, stately and leafy and bare of bloom, save for a few
ashen-hued bunches lingering late amid the heavy foliage. At the foot of
the garden the wall was hidden in raspberry vines, weighty with ripening
fruit.

The judge closed the gate after him and ascended the steps. It was not
until he had crossed the wide hall and opened the door of his study that
he heard the patter of bare feet, and turned to find that the boy had
followed him.

For an instant he regarded the child blankly; then his hospitality
asserted itself, and he waved him courteously into the room.

"Walk in, walk in, and take a seat. I am at your service."

He crossed to one of the tall windows, unfastening the heavy inside
shutters, from which the white paint was fast peeling away. As they fell
back a breeze filled the room, and the ivory faces of microphylla roses
stared across the deep window-seat. The place was airy as a summer-house
and odorous with the essence of roses distilled in the sunshine beyond.
On the high plastered walls, above the book-shelves, rows of bygone
Bassetts looked down on their departed possessions--stately and severe
in the artificial severity of periwigs and starched ruffles. They looked
down with immobile eyes and the placid monotony of past fashions,
smiling always the same smile, staring always at the same spot of floor
or furniture.

Below them the room was still hallowed by their touch. They asserted
themselves in the quaint curves of the rosewood chairs, in the blue
patterns upon the willow bowls, and in the choice lavender of the old
Wedgwood. Their handiwork was visible in the laborious embroideries of
the fire-screen near the empty grate, and the spinet in one unlighted
corner still guarded their gay and amiable airs.

"Sit down," said the judge. "I am at your service."

He seated himself before his desk of hand-carved mahogany, pushing aside
the papers that littered its baize-covered lid. In the half-gloom of the
high-ceiled room his face assumed the look of a portrait in oils, and he
seemed to have descended from his allotted square upon the plastered
wall, to be but a boldly limned composite likeness of his race, awaiting
the last touches and the gilded frame.

"What can I do for you?" he asked again, his tone preserving its
unfailing courtesy. He had not made an uncivil remark since the close of
the war--a line of conduct resulting less from what he felt to be due to
others than from what he believed to be becoming in himself.

The boy shifted on his bare feet. In the old-timed setting of the
furniture he was an alien--an anachronism--the intrusion of the
hopelessly modern into the helplessly past. His hair made a rich spot in
the colourless atmosphere, and it seemed to focus the incoming light
from the unshuttered window, leaving the background in denser shadow.

The animation of his features jarred the serenity of the room. His
profile showed gnome-like against the nodding heads of the microphylla
roses.

"There ain't nothin' in peanut-raisin'," he said suddenly; "I--I'd
ruther be a judge."

"My dear boy!" exclaimed the judge, and finished helplessly, "my dear
boy--I--well--I--"

They were both silent. The regular droning of the old clock sounded
distinctly in the stillness. The perfume of roses, mingling with the
musty scent from the furniture, borrowed the quality of musk.

The child was breathing heavily. Suddenly he dug the dirty knuckles of
one fist into his eyes.

"Don't cry," began the judge. "Please don't. Perhaps you would like to
run out and play with my boy Tom?"

"I warn't cryin'," said the child. "It war a gnat."

His hand left his eyes and returned to his hat--a wide-brimmed harvest
hat, with a shoestring tied tightly round the crown.

When the judge spoke again it was with seriousness.

"Nicholas--your name is Nicholas, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir."

"How old are you?"

"Twelve, sir."

"Can you read?"

"Yes, sir."

"Write?"

"Y-e-s, sir."

"Spell?"

The child hesitated. "I--I can spell--some."

"Don't you know it is a serious thing to be a judge?"

"Yes, sir."

"You must be a lawyer first."

"Yes, sir."

"It is hard work."

"Yes, sir."

"And sometimes it's no better than farming for crows."

The boy shook his head. "It's cleaner work, sir."

The judge laughed.

"I'm afraid you are obstinate, Nicholas," he said, and added: "Now, what
do you want me to do for you? I can't make you a judge. It took me fifty
years to make myself one--a third-rate one at that--"

"I--I'd l-i-k-e to take a bo-b-o-o-k," stammered the boy.

"Dear me!" said the judge irritably, "dear me!"

He frowned, his gaze skimming his well-filled shelves. He regretted
suddenly that he had spoken to the child at the court-house. He would
never be guilty of such an indiscretion again. Of what could he have
been thinking? A book! Why didn't he ask for food--money--his best piece
of fluted Royal Worcester?

Then a loud, boyish laugh rang in from the garden, and his face softened
suddenly. In the sun-scorched, honest-eyed little figure before him he
saw his own boy--the single child of his young wife, who was lying
beneath a marble slab in the churchyard. Her face, mild and
Madonna-like, glimmered against the pallid rose leaves in the deep
window-seat.

He turned hastily away.

"Yes, yes," he answered, "I will lend you one. Read the titles
carefully. Don't let the books fall. Never lay them face downwards--and
don't turn down the leaves!"

The boy advanced timidly to the shelves between the southern windows. He
ran his hands slowly along the lettered backs, his lips moving as he
spelled out the names.

"The F-e-d-e-r-a-l-i-s-t," "B-l-a-c-k-s-t-o-n-e-'s
C-o-m-m-e-n-t-a-r-i-e-s," "R-e-v-i-s-e-d Sta-tu-tes of the U-ni-ted
Sta-tes."

The judge drew up to his desk and looked over his letters. Then he took
up his pen and wrote several replies in his fine, flowing handwriting.
He had forgotten the boy, when he felt a touch upon his arm.

"What is it?" he asked absently. "Ah, it is you? Yes, let me see. Why!
you've got Sir Henry Maine!"

The boy was holding the book in both hands. As the judge laughed he
flushed nervously and turned towards the door.

The judge leaned back in his chair, watching the small figure cross the
room and disappear into the hall. He saw the tracks of dust which the
boy's feet left upon the smooth, bare floor, but he was not thinking of
them. Then, as the child went out upon the porch, he started up.

"Nicholas!" he called, "don't turn down the leaves!"




II


A facetious stranger once remarked that Kingsborough dozed through the
present to dream of the past and found the future a nightmare. Had he
been other than a stranger, he would, perhaps, have added that
Kingsborough's proudest boast was that she had been and was not--a
distinction giving her preëminence over certain cities whose charters
were not received from royal grants--cities priding themselves not only
upon a multiplicity of streets, but upon the more plebeian fact that the
feet of their young men followed the offending thoroughfares to the
undignified music of the march of progress.

But, whatever might be said of places that shall be nameless, it was
otherwise with Kingsborough. Kingsborough was the same yesterday,
to-day, and forever. She who had feasted royal governors, staked and
lost upon Colonial races, and exploded like an ignited powder-horn in
the cause of American independence, was still superbly conscious of the
honours which had been hers. Her governors were no longer royal, nor did
she feast them; her races were run by fleet-footed coloured urchins on
the court-house green; her powder-magazine had evolved through
differentiation from a stable into a church; but Kingsborough clung to
her amiable habits. Travellers still arrived at the landing stage some
several miles distant and were driven over all but impassable roads to
the town. The eastern wall of the court-house still bore the sign
"England Street," though the street had vanished beneath encroaching
buttercups, and the implied loyalty had been found wanting. Kingsborough
juries still sat in their original semicircle, with their backs to the
judge and their faces, presumably, to the law; Kingsborough farmers
still marketed their small truck in the street called after the Duke of
Gloucester; and Kingsborough cows still roamed at will over the vaults
in the churchyard. In time trivial changes would come to pass. Tourists
would arrive with the railroad; the powder-magazine would turn from a
church into a museum; gardens would decay and ancient elms would fall,
but the farmers and the cows would not be missed from their accustomed
haunts. On the hospitable thresholds of "general" stores battle-scarred
veterans of the war between the States dealt in victorious reminiscences
of vanquishment. They had fought well, they had fallen silently, and
they had risen without bitterness. For the people of Kingsborough had
opened their doors to wounded foes while the battle raged through their
streets, succouring while they resisted. They lived easily and they died
hard, but when death came they met it, not in grim Puritanism, but with
a laugh upon the lips. They made a joy of life while it was possible,
and when that ceased to be, they did the next best thing and made a
friend of death. Long ago theirs had been the first part in Virginia,
and, as they still believed, theirs had been also the centre of all
things. Now the high places were laid low, and the greatness had passed
as a trumpet that is blown. Kingsborough persisted still, but it
persisted evasively, hovering, as it were, upon the outskirts of modern
advancement. And the outside world took note only when it made tours to
historic strongholds, or sent those of itself that were adjudged insane
to the hospitable shelter of the asylum upon the hill.

It was afternoon, and Kingsborough was asleep.

Along the verdurous, gray lanes the houses seemed abandoned, shuttered,
filled with shade. From the court-house green came the chime of
cow-bells rising and falling in slow waves of sound. A spotted calf
stood bleating in the crooked footpath, which traversed diagonally the
waste of buttercups like a white seam in a cloth of gold. Against the
arching sky rose the bell-tower of the grim old church, where the
sparrows twittered in the melancholy gables and the startled face of the
stationary clock stared blankly above the ivied walls. Farther away, at
the end of a wavering lane, slanted the shadow of the insane asylum.

Across the green the houses were set in surrounding gardens like cards
in bouquets of mixed blossoms. They were of frame for the most part,
with shingled roofs and small, square windows hidden beneath climbing
roses. On one of the long verandas a sleeping girl lay in a hammock, a
gray cat at her feet. No sound came from the house behind her, but a
breeze blew through the dim hall, fluttering the folds of her dress.
Beyond the adjoining garden a lady in mourning entered a gate where
honeysuckle grew, and above, on the low-dormered roof, a white pigeon
sat preening its feathers. Up the main street, where a few sunken bricks
of a vanished pavement were still visible, an old negro woman, sitting
on the stone before her cabin, lighted her replenished pipe with a
taper, and leaned back, smoking, in the doorway, her scarlet
handkerchief making a spot of colour on the dull background.

The sun was still high when the judge came out upon his porch, a smile
of indecision on his face and his hat in his hand. Pausing upon the
topmost step, he cast an uncertain glance sideways at the walk leading
past the church, and then looked straight ahead through the avenue of
maples, which began at the smaller green facing the ancient site of the
governor's palace and skirted the length of the larger one, which took
its name from the court-house. At last he descended the steps with his
leisurely tread, turning at the gate to throw a remonstrance to an old
negro whose black face was framed in the library window.

"Now, Cæsar, didn't I--"

"Lord, Marse George, dis yer washed-out blue bowl, wid de little white
critters sprawlin' over it, done come ter pieces--"

"Now, Cæsar, haven't I told you twenty times to let Delilah wash my
Wedgwood?"

"Fo' de Lord, Marse George, I ain't breck hit. I uz des' hol'n it in
bofe my han's same es I'se hol'n dis yer broom, w'en it come right ter
part. I declar 'twarn my fault, Marse George, 'twarn nobody's fault
'cep'n hit's own."

The judge closed the gate and waved the face from the window.

"Go about your business, Cæsar," he said, "and keep your hands off my
china--"

Then his tone lost its asperity as he held out his hands to a pretty
girl who was coming across the green.

"So you are back from school, Miss Juliet," he said gallantly. "I was
telling your mother only yesterday that I didn't approve of sending our
fairest products away from Kingsborough. It wasn't done in my day. Then
the prettiest girls stayed at home and gave our young fellows a chance."

The girl shook her head until the blue ribbons on her straw hat
fluttered in the wind, and blushed until her soft eyes were like
forget-me-nots set in rose leaves. She possessed a serene, luminous
beauty, which became intensified beneath the gaze of the beholder.

"I have come back for good, now," she answered in a serious sweetness of
voice; "and I am out this afternoon looking up my Sunday-school class.
The children have scattered sadly. You will let me have Tom again, won't
you?"

"Have Tom! Why, you may have him every day and Sunday too--the lucky
scamp! Ah, I only wish I were a boy again, with a soul worth saving and
such a pair of eyes in search of it."

The girl dimpled into a smile and flushed to her low, white forehead, on
which the soft hair was smoothly parted before it broke into sunny curls
about the temples. She exhaled an atmosphere of gentleness mixed with a
saintly coquetry, which produced an impression at once human and divine,
such as one receives from the sight of a rose in a Bible or a curl in
the hair of a saint. The judge looked at her warmly, sighing half
happily, half regretfully.

"And to think that the young rogues don't realise their blessings," he
said. "There's not one of them that wouldn't rather be off fishing than
learn his catechism. Ah, in my day things were different--things were
different."

"Were you very pious, sir?" asked the girl with a flash of laughter.

The judge shook his stick playfully.

"I can't tell tales," he answered, "but in my day we should have taken
more than the catechism at your bidding, my dear. When your father was
courting your mother--and she was like you, though she hadn't your eyes,
or your face, for that matter--he went into her Bible class, though he
was at least five and twenty and the others were small boys under ten.
She was a sad flirt, and she led him a dance."

"He liked it," said the girl. "But, if you will give my message to Tom,
I won't come in. I am looking for Dudley Webb, and I see his mother at
her gate. Good-bye! Be sure and tell Tom to come Sunday."

She nodded brightly, lifted her muslin skirts, and recrossed the street.
The judge watched her until the flutter of her white dress vanished down
the lane of maples; then he turned to speak to the occupants of a
carriage that had drawn up to the sidewalk.

The vehicle was of an old-fashioned make, bare of varnish, with rickety,
mud-splashed wheels and rusty springs. It was drawn by an ill-matched
pair of horses and driven by a lame coloured boy, who carried a peeled
hickory branch for a whip.

"Ah, General Battle," said the judge to a stout gentleman with a red
face and an expansive shirt front from which the collar had wilted away;
"fine afternoon! Is that Eugenia?" to a little girl of seven or eight
years, with a puppy of the pointer breed in her arms, and "How are you,
Sampson?" to the coloured driver.

The three greeted him simultaneously, whereupon he leaned forward,
resting his hand upon the side of the carriage.

"The young folks are growing up," he said. "I have just seen Juliet
Burwell, and, on my life, she gets prettier every day. We shan't keep
her long."

"Keep her!" replied the general vigorously, wiping his large face with a
large pocket handkerchief. "Keep her! If I were thirty years younger,
you shouldn't keep her a day--not a day, sir."

The little girl looked up gravely from the corner of the seat, tossing
her short, dark plait from her shoulder. "What would you do with her,
papa?" she asked. "We've got no place to put her at home."

The general threw back his great head and laughed till his wide girth
shook like a bag of meal.

"Oh, you needn't worry, Eugie," he said. "I'm not the man I used to be.
She wouldn't look at me. Bless your heart, she wouldn't look at me if I
asked her--"

Eugenia clasped her puppy closer and turned her eyes upon her father's
jovial face.

"I don't see how she could help it if you stood in front of her," she
answered gravely, in a voice rich with the blending of negro
intonations.

The general shook again until the carriage creaked on its rusty
springs, and the coloured boy, Sampson, let the reins fall and joined in
the hilarity.

"She won't let me so much as look at a girl!" exclaimed the general
delightedly, stooping to recover the brown linen lap robe which had
slipped from his knees. "She's as jealous as if I were twenty and had a
score of sweethearts."

The little girl did not reply, but she flushed angrily. "Don't,
precious," she said to the puppy, who was licking her cheek with his
warm, red tongue.

"What have you named him, Eugie?" asked the judge, changing the subject
with that gracious tact which was mindful of the least emergency. "He is
nicely marked, I see."

"I call him Jim," replied Eugenia. She spoke gravely, and the gravity
contrasted oddly with the animation of her features. "But his real name
is James Burwell Battle. Bernard and I christened him in the
spring-house--so he'll go to heaven."

"Cap'n Burwell gave him to her, you know," explained the general, who
laughed whenever his daughter spoke, as if the fact of her talking at
all was a source of amazement to him, "and she hasn't let go of him
since she got him. By the way, Judge, you have a first-rate garden spot.
I hear your asparagus is the finest in town. Ours is very poor this
year. I must have a new bed made before next season. Ah, what is it,
daughter?"

"You've forgotten to buy the sugar," said Eugenia, "and Aunt Chris can't
put up her preserves. And you told me to remind you of the whip--"

"Bless your heart, so I did. Sampson lost that whip a month ago, and
I've never remembered it yet. Well, good-day--good-day."

The judge raised his hat with a stately inclination; the general nodded
good-naturedly, still grasping the linen robe with his plump, red hand;
and the carriage jolted along the green and disappeared behind the
glazed brick walls of the church.

The judge regarded his walking-stick meditatively for a moment, and
continued his way. The smile with which he had followed the vanishing
figure of Juliet Burwell returned to his face, and his features softened
from their usual chilly serenity.

He had gone but a short distance and was passing the iron gate of the
churchyard, when the droning of a voice came to him, and looking beyond
the bars, he saw little Nicholas Burr lying at full length upon a marble
slab, his head in his hands and his feet waving in the air.

Entering the gate, the judge followed the walk of moss-grown stones
leading to the church steps, and paused within hearing of the voice,
which went on in an abstracted drawl.

"The most cel-e-bra-ted sys-tem of juris-pru-dence known to the world
begins, as it ends, with a code--" He was not reading, for the book was
closed. He seemed rather to be repeating over and over again words which
had been committed to memory.

"With a code. From the commencement to the close of its history, the
ex-posi-tors of Ro-man Law con-sistently em-ployed lan-guage which
implied that the body of their sys-tem rested on the twelve
De-cem-viral Tables--Dec-em-vi-ral--De-cem-vi-ral Tables."

"Bless my soul!" said the judge. The boy glanced up, blushed, and would
have risen, but the judge waved him back.

"No--no, don't get up. I heard you as I was going by. What are you
doing?"

"Learnin'."

"Learning! Dear me! What do you mean by learning?"

"I'm learnin' by heart, sir--and--and, if you don't mind, sir, what does
j-u-r-i-s-p-r-u-d-e-n-c-e mean?"

The judge started, returning the boy's eager gaze with one of kindly
perplexity.

"Bless my soul!" he said again. "You aren't trying to understand that,
are you?"

The boy grew scarlet and his lips trembled. "No, sir," he answered. "I'm
jest learnin' it now. I'll know what it means when I'm bigger--"

"And you expect to remember it?" asked the judge.

"I don't never forget," said the boy.

"Bless my soul!" exclaimed the judge for the third time.

For a moment he stood looking silently down upon the marble slab with
its defaced lettering. Of the wordy epitaph which had once redounded to
the honour of the bones beneath there remained only the words "who
departed," but he read these with a long abstracted gaze.

"Let me see," he said at last, speaking with his accustomed dignity.
"Did you ever go to school, Nicholas?"

"Yes, sir."

"When?"

"I went 'most three winters, sir, but I had to leave off on o'count o'
pa's not havin' any hand 'cep'n me."

The judge smiled.

"Ah, well," he returned. "We'll see if you can't begin again. My boy has
a tutor, you know, and his playmates come to study with him. He's about
your age, and it will give you a start. Come in to-morrow at nine, and
we'll talk it over. No, don't get up. I am going."

And he passed out of the churchyard, closing the heavy gate with a
metallic clang. Nicholas lay on the marble slab, but the book slipped
from his hands, and he gazed straight before him at the oriel window,
where the ivy was tremulous with the shining bodies and clamorous voices
of nesting sparrows. They darted swiftly from gable to gable, filling
the air with shrill sounds of discord, and endowing with animation the
inanimate pile, wrapping the dead bricks in a living shroud.

On the other side swept the long, colourless grasses, rippling in faint
waves like a still lake that reflects the sunshine and swaying lightly
beneath myriads of gauzy-winged bees that flashed with a droning noise
from blade to blade, to find rest in the yellow hearts of the damask
roses. Across the white vaults and the low-lying marble slabs
innumerable shadows chased, and from above the gnarled old locust trees
swept a fringe of vivid green, the slender blossoms hanging in tassels
from the branches' ends, and filling the air with a soft and ceaseless
rain of fragrant petals. Pale as the ghosts of dead leaves, they fell
always, fluttering night and day from the twisted boughs, settling in
creamy flakes upon the bending grasses, and outlining in delicate
tracery the epitaphs upon the discoloured marbles.

Nicholas lay with wide-open eyes, looking up at the oriel window where
the sparrows twittered. On a near vault a catbird poised for an instant,
surveying him with bright, distrustful eyes. Then, with an impetuous
flutter of slate-gray wings, it fled to the poisonous oak on the far
brick wall. A red-and-white cow, passing along the lane outside, stopped
before the closed gate, and stood philosophically chewing the cud as she
looked within through impeding bars. From the judge's garden came the
faint sound of a negro voice as the old gardener weeded the vegetables.
Nicholas rolled over again and faced the outstretched wings of the
noseless angel on the nearest tombstone. The loss of the nose had
distorted the marble smile into a grimace, which gave a leer to the
remaining features. As the boy looked at it he laughed suddenly, and his
voice startled him amid the droning of bees. Then he sat up and glanced
at his brier-scratched feet stretched upon the slab, and laughed again
for the sheer joy of discord.




III


Nicholas followed the main street to its sudden end at King's College,
and turned into one of the diverging ways which skirted the whitewashed
plank fence of the college grounds, and led to what was known in the
neighbourhood as the Old Stage Road. Passing a straggling group of negro
cabins, it stretched, naked, bleached, and barren, for a good half-mile,
dividing with its sandy length the low-lying fields, which were sown on
the one side in a sparse crop of grain and on the other in the rich
leaves and round pink heads of ripening clover. At the end of the
half-mile the road ascended a slight elevation, and the character of the
soil changed abruptly into clay of vivid red, which, extending a dozen
yards up the rain-washed hillside, appeared, in a general view of the
landscape, like the scarlet tongue protruding from the silvery body of a
serpent.

Far ahead to the right of the highway and beyond the thinly sown wheat a
stretch of pine woodland was darkly limned against the western horizon,
standing a gloomy advance guard of the shadows of the night. At its foot
the newer green of the late spring foliage took a frivolous aspect,
presenting the effect of deep-tinted foam breaking against the
impenetrable mass of darkness.

The boy trudged resolutely along the sandy road, reaching at intervals
to grasp handfuls of sassafras leaves from the bushes beside the way.
From the ditch on the left a brown toad hopped slowly into the dust of
the road. On the worm-eaten rails of the fence, on the other side, a
gray lizard glided swiftly like a stealthy shadow of the leaves of the
poisonous oak.

Nicholas picked up a stone from the roadside and aimed it at the slimy
little body, but his throw erred, and the missile fell harmlessly into
the wheat field beyond, startling a blackbird with scarlet marks, which
soared suddenly above the bearded grain and vanished, with a tremulous
cry and a flame of outstretched wings, into the distant wood.

The sun had gone down behind the pines and a warm mist steamed up from
the cooling earth, condensing into heavy dew on the dusty leaves of the
plants in the ditch. Above the lowering pines the horizon burned to a
deep scarlet, like an inverted brazier at red heat, and one gigantic
tree, rising beyond the jagged line of the forest, was silhouetted
sharply against the enkindled clouds. Suddenly, from the shadows of the
long road, a voice rose plaintively. It was rich and deep and
colourific, and it seemed to hover close to the warmth of the earth,
weighed down by its animal melody. It had mingled so subtly with the
stillness that it was as much a part of nature as the cry of a
whip-poor-will beyond the thicket or the sunset in the pine-guarded
west. At first it came faintly, and the words were lost, but as Nicholas
gained upon the singer he caught more clearly the air and the song.

  "_Oh, de Ark hit came ter res'
      On-de-hill,
    Oh, de Ark hit came ter res'
      On-de-hill,
    En' dar ole Noah stood,
    En' spread his han's abroad,
    Er sacri-fice ter-Gawd
      On-de-hill._"

Nicholas quickened his pace into a run and, in a moment, saw the
stooping figure of an old negro toiling up the red clay hillside, a
staff in his hand and a bag of meal on his shoulder. In the vivid light
of the sunset his stature was exaggerated in size, giving him an
appearance at once picturesque and pathetic--softening his rugged
outline and magnifying the distortion of age.

As he ascended the gradual incline he planted his staff firmly in the
soil, shifting his bag from side to side and uttering inaudible grunts
in the pauses of his song.

  "_En' dar, mid flame en smoke,
    De great Jehovah s-poke.
    En' awful thunder b-roke,
      On-de-hill._"

"Uncle Ish!" called the boy sharply. The old man lowered the bag from
his shoulder and turned slowly round.

"Who dat?" he demanded severely. "Ain't I done tell you dar ain' no
ha'nts 'long dis yer road?"

"It's me, Uncle Ish," said the boy. "It's Nick Burr. I heard you singing
a long ways off."

"Den what you want ter go a-hollerin' en a-stealin' up on er ole nigger
fer des' 'bout sundown?"

"But, Uncle Ish, I didn't mean to scare you. I jest heard--"

"Skeer! Who dat you been skeerin'? Ain't I done tole you dar ain' no
ha'nts round dese parts? What I gwine ter be skeered fer uv er little no
'count white trash dat ain' never own er nigger in dere life? Who you
done skeer dis time?"

He picked up his bag, slung it over his shoulder and went on his way,
the boy trotting beside him. For a time the old man muttered angrily
beneath his breath, and then, becoming mollified by the boy's silence,
he looked kindly down on the small red head at his elbow.

"You ain't said howdy, honey," he remarked in a fault-finding tone. "Dar
ain' no manners dese days, nohow. Dey ain' no manners en dey ain' no
nuttin'. De niggers, dey is gwine plum outer dey heads, en de po' white
trash dey's gwine plum outer dey places."

He looked at Nicholas, who flinched and hung his head.

"Dar ain' nobody lef to keep 'em ter dey places, no mo'. In Ole Miss'
time der wa'nt no traipsin' roun' er niggers en intermixin' up er de
quality en de trash. Ole Miss, she des' pint out der place en dey stay
dar. She ain' never stomach noner der high-ferlutin' doin's roun' her.
She know whar she b'long en she know whar dey b'long. Bless yo' life,
Ole Miss wuz dat perticklar she wouldn't drink arter Ole Marster,
hisself, 'thout renchin' out de gow'd twel t'wuz mos' bruck off de
handle."

He sighed and shifted his bag.

"Ef Ole Miss 'ud been yer thoo' dis las' war, dar wouldn't er been no
slue-footed Yankees a-foolin' roun' her parlour. She'd uv up en show'd
'em de do'--"

"Are all Yankees slue-footed, Uncle Ish?"

"All dose I seed, honey--des' es slue-footed. En dar wuz Miss Chris' en
ole Miss Grissel a-makin' up ter 'em, en a-layin' out er demselves fer
'em en a-spreadin' uv de table, des' de same es ef dey went straight on
dey toes. Dar wan't much sense in dat ar war, nohow, an' I ain' never
knowed yit what 'twuz dey fit about. Hit wuz des' a-hidin' en a-teckin'
ter de bushes, en a-hidin' agin, en den a-feastin', en a-curtsin' ter de
Yankees. Dar wan't no sense in it, no ways hits put, but Ise heered
Marse Tom 'low hit wuz a civil war, en dat's what it wuz. When de
Yankees come a-ridin' up en a-reinin' in dere hosses befo' de front
po'ch, en Miss Chris come out a-smilin' en a-axin' howdy, en den dey
stan' dar a-bowin' en a-scrapin', hit wuz des' es civil es ef dey'd come
a-co'tin'. But Ole Miss wuz dead en buried, she wuz."

Nicholas shook his head without speaking. There was a shade of
consolation in the thought that the awful "Ole Miss" was below the earth
and beyond the possibility of pointing out his place.

The brazier in the west snapped asunder suddenly, and a single forked
flame shot above the jagged pines and went out in the dove-coloured
clouds. In a huge oak beyond the rail fence there was a harsh rustling
of wings where a flock of buzzards settled to roost.

"Yes, Lord, she wuz dead en buried," repeated Uncle Ish slowly. "En dar
ain' none like her lef' roun' yer now. Dis yer little Euginny is des'
de spit er her ma, en it 'ud mek Ole Miss tu'n in her grave ter hear
tell 'bout her gwines on. De quality en de po' folks is all de same ter
her. She ain' no mo' un inspecter er pussons den de Lord is--ef Ole Miss
wuz 'live, I reckon she'd lam 'er twel she wuz black en blue--"

"Is she so very bad?" asked Nicholas in an awed voice.

Uncle Ish turned upon him reprovingly.

"Bad!" he repeated. "Who gwine call Ole Miss' gran'chile bad? I don't
reckon it's dese yer new come folks es hev des' sprouted outer de dut es
is gwine ter--"

At this instant the sound of a vehicle reached them, gaining upon them
from the direction of Kingsborough, and they fell to one side of the
road, leaving room for the horses to pass. It was the Battle carriage,
rolling heavily on its aged wheels and creaking beneath the general's
weight.

"Howdy, Marse Tom!" called Uncle Ishmael. The general responded
good-naturedly, and the carriage passed on, but, before turning into the
branch road a few yards ahead, it came to a standstill, and the bright,
decisive voice of the little girl floated back.

"Uncle Ish--I say, Uncle Ish, don't you want to ride?"

"Dar, now!" cried Uncle Ishmael exultantly. "Ain't I tell you she wuz
plum crazy? What she doin' a-peckin' up en ole nigger like I is?"

He hastened his steps and scrambled into the seat beside the driver,
settling his bag between his knees; and, with a flick of the peeled
hickory whip, the carriage rolled into the branch road and disappeared,
scattering a whirl of mud drops as it splashed through the shallow
puddles which lingered in the dryest season beneath the heavy shade of
the wood.

Nicholas turned into the branch road also, for the poor lands of his
father adjoined the slightly richer ones of the Battles. He felt tired
and a little lonely, and he wished suddenly that a friendly cart would
come along in which he might ride the remainder of the way. Between the
densely wooded thicket on either side, the road looked dark and solemn.
It was spread with a rotting carpet of last year's leaves, soft and damp
under foot, and polished into shining tracks in the ruts left by passing
wheels. Through the dusk the ghostly bodies of beech trees stood out
distinctly from the surrounding wood, as if marked by a silver light
falling from the topmost branches. The hoarse, grating notes of
jar-flies intensified the stillness.

Nicholas went on steadily, spurred by superstitious terror of the
silence. He remembered that Uncle Ish had said there were no "ha'nts"
along this road, but the assurance was barren of comfort. Old Uncle
Dan'l Mule had certainly seen a figure in a white sheet rise up out of
that decayed oak stump in the hollow, for he had sworn to it in the
boy's presence in Aunt Rhody Sand's cabin the night of her daughter
Viny's wedding. As for Viny's husband Saul, he had declared that one
night after ten o'clock, when he was coming through this wood, the
"booger-boos" had got after him and chased him home.

At the end of the wood the road came out upon the open again, and in
the distance Nicholas could see, like burnished squares, the windows of
his father's house. Between the thicket and the house there was a long
stretch of clearing, which had been once planted in corn, and now
supported a headless army of dry stubble, amid a dull-brown waste of
broomsedge. The last pale vestige of the afterglow, visible across the
level country, swept the arid field and softened the harsh outlines of
the landscape. It was barren soil, whose strength had been exhausted
long since by years of production without returns, tilled by hands that
had forced without fertilising. There was now grim pathos in its
absolute sterility, telling as it did of long-gone yields of grain and
historic harvests.

Nicholas skirted the waste, and was turning into the pasture gate on the
opposite side of the road, when he heard the shrill sound of a voice
from the direction of the house.

"Nick!--who--a Nick!"

On one of the cedar posts of the fence of the cow-pen he discerned the
small figure and green cotton frock of his half-sister, Sarah Jane, who
was shouting through her hollowed palms to increase the volume of sound.

"I say, Nick! The she-ep hev' been driv-en u-p! Come to sup-per!"

She vanished from the post and Nicholas ran up the remainder of the road
and swung himself over the little gate which led into the small square
yard immediately surrounding the house. At the pump near the back door
his father, who had just come from work, was washing his hands before
going into supper, and near a row of pointed chicken coops the three
younger children were "shooing" up the tiny yellow broods. The yard was
unkempt and ugly, run wild in straggling ailanthus shoots and littered
with chips from the wood-pile.

As he entered the house he saw his stepmother placing a dish of fried
bacon upon the table, which was covered with a "watered" oilcloth of a
bright walnut tint. At her back stood Sarah Jane with a plate of corn
bread in one hand and a glass pitcher containing buttermilk in the
other. She was a slight, flaxen-haired child, with wizened features and
sore, red eyelids.

As his stepmother caught sight of him she stopped on her way to the
stove and surveyed him with sharp but not unkindly eyes.

"You've been takin' your time 'bout comin' home," she remarked, "an' I
reckon you're powerful hungry. You can sit down if you want to."

She was long and lean and withered, with a chronic facial neuralgia,
which gave her an irritable expression and a querulous voice. For the
past several years Nicholas had never seen her without a large cotton
handkerchief bound tightly about her face. She had been the boy's aunt
before she married his father, and her affection for him was proved by
her allowing no one to harry him except herself.

"How's your face, ma?" asked Nicholas with the indifference of habit as
he took his seat at the table, while Sarah Jane went to the door to call
her father. When Burr came in the inquiry was repeated.

"Face any easier, Marthy?" It was a form that had been gone through
with at every meal since the malady began, and Marthy Burr, while she
deplored its insincerity, would have resented its omission.

"Don't you all trouble 'bout my neuralgy," she returned with resigned
exasperation as she stood up to pour the coffee out of the large tin
boiler. "It's mine, an' I've borne worse things, I reckon, which ain't
sayin' that 'tain't near to takin' my head off."

Amos Burr drank his coffee without replying, the perspiration standing
in drops on his large, freckled face and shining on his heavy eyebrows.
Presently he looked at Nicholas, who was eating abstractedly, his gaze
on his plate.

"I got that thar piece of land broke to-day," he said, "an' I reckon you
can take the one-horse harrow and go over it to-morrow. Them peanuts
ought to hev' been in the ground two weeks ago--"

"They ain't hulled yet," interrupted his wife. "Sairy Jane ain't done
more'n half of 'em. She and Nick can do the balance after supper. Hurry
up, Sairy Jane, and get through. Nannie, don't you touch another slice
of that middlin'. You'll be frettin' all night."

Nicholas looked up nervously. "I don't want to harrow the land
to-morrow, pa," he began; "the judge said I might come in to school--"

Amos Burr looked at him helplessly. "Wall, I never!" he exclaimed.

"Did you ever hear the likes?" said his wife.

"I can go, pa, can't I?" asked Nicholas.

"He can go, pa, can't he?" repeated Sarah Jane, looking up with her
mouth wide open and full of corn bread.

Burr shook his head and looked at his wife.

"I don't see as I can get any help," he said. "You're as good as a hand,
and I can't spare you." Then he concluded with a touch of irritation, "I
don't see as you want any more schoolin'. You can read and write now a
heap better'n I can."

Nicholas choked over his bread and his lips trembled.

"I--I don't want to be like you, pa!" he cried breathlessly, and the
unshed tears stung his eyelids. "I want to be different!"

Burr looked up stolidly. "I don't see as you want any more schoolin',"
he repeated stubbornly, but his wife came sharply to the boy's
assistance.

"I wish you'd stop pesterin' the child, Amos," she said, inspired less
by the softness of amiability than by the genius of opposition. "I don't
see how you can be everlastingly doin' it--my dead sister's child, too."

Nicholas swallowed his tears with his coffee and turned to his father.
"I can get up 'fore day and do a piece of the land, and I can help you
'bout the sowin' when I get back in the evening. I'll be back by
twelve--"

"Oh, I reckon you can go if you're so set on it," said Amos gruffly. He
rose and left the room, stopping in the hall to get a bucket of
buttermilk for the hogs. Nicholas went over to the window and joined
Sarah Jane, who was shelling the peanuts, carefully separating the outer
hulls from the inner pink skins, which were left intact for sowing.
Marthy Burr, who was clearing off the table, let fall a china dish and
began scolding the younger children.

"I declare, if you don't all but drive me daft!" she said, flinching
from a twinge of neuralgia and raising her voice querulously. "Why can't
you take yourselves off and give me some rest? Nannie, you and Jake go
out to the old oak and see if all the turkeys air up. Be sure and count
'em--and take Jubal (the youngest) 'long with you. If you see your pa
tell him I say to look at the brindle cow. She acted mighty queer at
milkin', and I reckon she'd better have a little bran mash--Sairy Jane,"
turning suddenly upon her eldest daughter, "if you eat another one of
them peanuts I'll box your jaws--"

Nicholas finished the peanuts and went upstairs to his little attic
room. He was not sleepy, and, after throwing himself upon his corn-shuck
mattress, he lay for a long time staring at the ceiling, thinking of the
morrow and listening to the groans of his stepmother as she tossed with
neuralgia.




IV


In the first glimmer of dawn Nicholas dressed himself and stole softly
down from the attic, the frail stairway creaking beneath his tread. As
he was unfastening the kitchen door, which led out upon a rough plank
platform called the "back porch," Marthy Burr stuck her head in from the
adjoining room where she slept, and called his name in a high-pitched,
querulous voice.

"Is that you, Nick?" she asked. "I declar, I'd jest dropped off to sleep
when you woke me comin' down stairs. I never could abide tip-toein',
nohow. I don't see how 'tis that I can't get no rest 'thout bein' roused
up, when your pa can turn right over and sleep through thunder. Whar you
goin' now?"

Nicholas stopped and held a whispered colloquy with her from the back
porch. "I'm goin' to drag the land some 'fore pa gets up," he answered.
"Then I'm goin' in to town. You know he said I might."

His stepmother shook her bandaged head peevishly and stood holding the
collar of her unbleached cotton gown.

"Oh, I reckon so," she responded. "I was think-in' 'bout goin' in myself
and hevin' my tooth out, but I s'pose I can wait on you. The Lord knows
I'm used to waitin'."

Nicholas looked at her in perplexity, his arm resting on the little
shelf outside, which supported the wooden water bucket and the
long-handled gourd.

"You can go when I come back," he said at last, adding with an effort,
"or, if it's so bad, I can stay at home."

But, having asserted her supremacy over his inclinations, Marthy Burr
relented. "Oh, I don't know as I'll go in to-day," she returned. "I
ain't got enough teeth left now to chew on, an' I don't believe it's the
teeth, nohow. It's the gums--"

She retreated into the room, whence the shrill voice of Sairy Jane
inquired:

"Air you up, ma? Why, 'tain't day!"

Nicholas closed the door and went out upon the porch. The yard looked
deserted and desolated, giving him a sudden realisation of his own
littleness and the immensity of the hour. It was as if the wheels of
time had stopped in the dim promise of things unfulfilled. A broken
scythe lay to one side amid the straggling ailanthus shoots; near the
wood-pile there was a wheelbarrow half filled with chips, and at a
little distance the axe was poised upon a rotten log. From the small
coops beside the hen-house came an anxious clucking as the fluffy yellow
chickens strayed beneath the uneven edges of their pointed prisons and
made independent excursions into the world.

In the far east the day was slowly breaking, and the open country was
flooded with pale, washed-out grays, like the background of an
impressionist painting. A heavy dew had risen in the night, and as the
boy passed through the dripping weeds on his way to the stable they left
a chill moisture upon his bare feet. His eyes were heavy with sleep,
and to his cloudy gaze the familiar objects of the barnyard assumed
grotesque and distorted shapes. The manure heap near the doorway
presented an effect of unreality, the pig-pen seemed to have suffered
witchery since the evening before, and the haystack, looming vaguely in
the drab distance, appeared to be woven of some phantasmal fabric.

He led out the old sorrel mare and followed her into the large ploughed
field beyond the cow-pen, where the harrow was lying on one side of the
brown ridges. As he passed the pen the startled sheep huddled into a far
corner, bleating plaintively, and the brindle cow looked after him with
soft, persuasive eyes. When he had attached the clanking chains of the
plough harness to the single-tree, he caught up the ropes which served
for reins and set out laboriously over the crumbling earth, which
yielded beneath his feet and made walking difficult.

The field extended from the cow-pen and the bright, green rows of
vegetables that were raised for market to the reedy brook which divided
his father's land from that belonging to General Battle. The brook was
always cool and shady, and silvery with minnows darting over the shining
pebbles beneath the clear water. As Nicholas looked across the neutral
furrows he could see the feathery branches of willows rising from the
gray mist, and, farther still up the sloping hillside, the dew-drenched
green of the mixed woodlands.

The land before him had been upturned by shallow ploughing some days
since, and it lay now pale and arid, the large clods of earth showing
the detached roots of grass and herbs, and presenting a hint of
menacing destruction rather than the prospect of the peaceful art of
cultivation. It was the boy's duty to drag the soil free from grass,
after which it would be laid out into rows some three feet apart. When
this was done two furrows would be thrown together to give what the
farmers called a "rise," the point of which would be finally levelled,
when the ground would be ready for the peanut-sowing, which was
performed entirely by hand.

The boy worked industriously through the deepening dawn, giving an
occasional "gee up, Rhody!" to the mare, and following the track of the
harrow with much the same concentration of purpose as that displayed by
his four-footed friend. He was strong for his years, lithe as a sapling,
and as fearless of elemental changes, and as he walked meditatively
across the bare field he might have suggested to an onlooker the
possible production of a vast fund of energy.

Presently the gray light was shot with gold and a streak of orange
fluttered like a ribbon in the east. In a moment a violet cloud floated
above the distant hill, and as its ends curled up from the quickening
heat it showed the splendour of a crimson lining. A single ray of
sunshine, pale as a spectral finger, pointed past the woodlands to the
brook beneath the willows, and the vague blur of the mixed forest warmed
into vivid tints, changing through variations from the clear emerald of
young maples to the olive dusk of evergreens.

Last of all the ploughed field, which had preserved a neutral cast,
blushed faintly in the sunrise, glowing to pale purple tones where the
sod was newly turned. From the fugitive richness of the soil a warm
breath rose suddenly, filling the air with the genial odour of earth and
sunshine. The shining, dark coils of worms were visible like threads in
the bright brown clods.

Nicholas raised his head and stared with unseeing eyes at the gorgeous
east. A rooster crowed shrilly, and he turned in the direction of the
barnyard. Then he flicked the ropes gently and went on, his gaze on the
ground. His thoughts, which at first were fixed solely upon the teeth of
the harrow, took tumultuous flight, and he reviewed for the hundredth
time his conversation with the judge and the vast avenue of the future
which was opening before him. He would not be like his father, of this
he was convinced--his father, who was always working with nothing to
show for it--whose planting was never on time, and whose implements were
never in place. His father had never had this gnawing desire to know
things, this passionate hatred of the work which he might not neglect.
His father had never tried to beat against the barriers of his ignorance
and been driven back, and beat again and wept, and read what he couldn't
understand. The teacher at the public school had told him that he was
far ahead of his years, and yet they had taken him away when he was
doing his level best, and put him to dragging the land, and gathering
the peanuts, and carrying the truck to market, and marking the sheep
with red paint, and bringing up the cows, and doing all the odd,
innumerable jobs they could devise. He let the ropes fall for an instant
and dug his fist into his eye; then he took them up again and went on
stolidly. At last the sun came out boldly above the hill, and the
hollows were flooded with light. In the centre of the field the boy's
head glowed like some large red insect. A hawk, winging slowly above
him, looked down as if uncertain of his species, and fluttered off
indifferently.

At six o'clock his stepmother came to the back door and called him to
breakfast.

When the meal was over Amos Burr went out to the field, and Nicholas was
sent to drive the sheep to the pasture. With vigorous wavings of a piece
of brushwood, and many darts from right to left, he succeeded finally in
driving them across the road and through the gate on the opposite side,
after which he returned to assist his stepmother about the house. Not
until nine o'clock, when he had seen the Battle children going up the
road, was he free to set off at a run for Kingsborough.

As he sped breathlessly along, past the wastelands, into the woods, down
the road to the hillside, and down the hillside to the road again, he
went too rapidly for thought. The fresh air brushed his heated face
gently, and, at the edge of the wood, where the shallow puddles
lingered, myriads of blue and yellow butterflies scattered into
variegated clumps of colour at his approach, darting from the moist
heaps of last year's leaves to the shining rivulets in the wheel ruts by
the way. A partridge whistled from the yellowing green of the wheat, and
a rabbit stole noiselessly from the sassafras in the ditch and shot shy
glances of alarm; but he did not turn his head, and his hand held no
ready stone.

Though he had run half the way, when at last he reached the judge's
house, and stood before the little office in the garden where the school
was held, his courage misgave him, and he leaned, trembling, against the
arbour where a grapevine grew. The sound of voices floated out to him,
mingled with bright, girlish laughter, and, looking through the open
window, he saw the light curls of a little girl against the darker head
of a boy. He choked suddenly with shyness, and would have hesitated
there until the morning was over had not the judge's old servant, Cæsar,
espied him from the dining-room window.

"Look yer, boy, what you doin' dar?" he demanded suspiciously, and then
called to some one inside the house. "Marse George, dat ar Burr boy is
a-loungin' roun' yo' yawd."

The judge did not respond, but the tutor came to the door of the office
and intercepted the boy's retreat. He was a pale, long-faced young man
in spectacles, with weak, blue eyes and a short, thin moustache. His
name was Graves, and he regarded what he called the judge's "quixotism"
with condescending good-nature.

"Is that you, Nicholas Burr?" he asked in a slightly supercilious voice.
"The judge has told me about you. So you won't be a farmer, eh? And you
won't stay in your class? Well, come in and we'll see what we can make
of you."

Nicholas followed him into the room and sat down at one of the pine
desks, while the judge's son, Tom, nodded to him from across the room,
and Bernard Battle grinned over his shoulder at his sister Eugenia, and
a handsome boy, called Dudley Webb, made a face which convulsed little
Sally Burwell, who hid her merriment in her curls. There were several
other children in the room, but Nicholas did not see them distinctly.
Something had got before his eyes and there was a lump in his throat. He
sat rigidly in his seat, his straw hat, with the shoestring around the
crown, lying upon the desk before him. He looked neither to the right
nor to the left, keeping his frightened gaze upon the tutor's face.

Mr. Graves asked him a few questions, which he could not answer, and
then, giving him a book, turned to the other children. As the lessons
went on it seemed to Nicholas that he had never known anything in his
life; that he should never know anything; and that he should always
remain the most ignorant person on earth--unless that lot fell to Sairy
Jane.

The difficulties besetting the path of knowledge appeared to be
insurmountable. Even if he had the books and the time he could never
learn anything--his head would prevent it.

"Bound Beloochistan, Tom," said the tutor, and Tom, a stout, fair-haired
boy with a heavy face, went through the process to the satisfaction of
Mr. Graves and to the amazement of Nicholas.

The office was a plain, square room, containing, besides the desks and
tables, an old secretary and a corner cupboard of an antique pattern,
which held an odd assortment of cracked china and chemist bottles. There
was also a square mahogany chest, called the wine-cellar, which had been
sent from the dining-room when the last bottle of Tokay was opened to
drink the health of the Confederacy.

Before the war the place had been used by the judge as a general
business room, but when the slaves were freed and there were fewer
servants it was found to be little needed, and was finally given over
entirely to the children's school.

When recess came the tutor left the office, telling Nicholas that he
might go home with the little girls if he liked. "I shall try to have
the books you need by to-morrow," he said, and, his natural amiability
overcoming his assumed superciliousness, he added pleasantly:

"I shouldn't mind being backward at first. The boys are older than you,
but you'll soon catch up."

He went out, and Nicholas had started towards the door, when Tom Bassett
flung himself before him, swinging skilfully over an intervening table.

"Hold up, carrot-head," he said. "Let's have a look at you. Are all
heads afire where you come from?"

"He's Amos Burr's boy," explained Bernard Battle with a grin. "He lives
'long our road. I saw him hoeing potatoes day before yesterday. He's got
freckles enough to tan a sheepskin!"

In the midst of the laugh which followed Nicholas stood awkwardly,
shifting his bare feet. His face was scarlet, and he fingered in
desperation the ragged brim of his hat.

"I reckon they're my freckles," he said doggedly.

"And I reckon you can keep 'em," retorted Bernard, mimicking his tone.
"We ain't going to steal 'em. I say, Eugie, here're some freckles for
sale!"

The dark little girl, who was putting up her books in one corner,
looked up and shook her head.

"Let me alone!" she replied shortly, and returned to her work, tugging
at the straps with both hands. Dudley Webb--a handsome, upright boy,
well dressed in a dark suit and linen shirt--lounged over as he munched
a sandwich.

He looked at Nicholas from head to foot, and his gaze was returned with
stolid defiance. Nicholas did not flinch, but for the first time he felt
ashamed of his ugliness, of his coarse clothes, of his briar-scratched
legs, of his freckles, and of the unalterable colour of his hair. He
wished with all his heart that he were safely in the field with his
father, driving the one-horse harrow across upturned furrows. He didn't
want to learn anything any more. He wanted only to get away.

"He's common," said Dudley at last, throwing a crust of bread through
the open window. "He's as common as--as dirt. I heard mother say so--"

"Father says he's _un_common," returned Tom doubtfully, turning his
honest eyes on Nicholas again. "He told Mr. Graves that he was a most
uncommon boy."

"Oh, well, you can play with him if you like," rejoined Dudley
resolutely, "but I shan't. He's old Amos Burr's son, anyway, who never
wore a whole shirt in his life."

"He had on one yesterday," said Bernard Battle impartially. "I saw it.
It was just made and hadn't been washed."

Nicholas looked up stubbornly. "You let my father alone!" he exclaimed,
spurred by the desire to resent something and finding it easier to
fight for another than himself. "You let my father alone, or I'll make
you!"

"I'd like to see you!" retorted Dudley wrathfully, and Nicholas had
squared up for the first blow, when before his swimming gaze a defender
intervened.

"You jest let him alone!" cried a voice, and the flutter of a blue
cotton skirt divided Dudley from his adversary. "You jest let him alone.
If you call him common I'll hit you, an'--an' you can't hit me back!"

"Eugie, you ought to be--" began Bernard, but she pushed the combatants
aside with decisive thrusts of her sunburned little hand, and planted
herself upon the threshold, her large, black eyes glowing like shaded
lamps.

"He wan't doin' nothin' to you, and you jest let him be. He's goin' to
tote my books home, an' you shan't touch him. I reckon I know what's
common as well as you do--an' he ain't--he ain't common."

Then she caught Nicholas's arm and marched off like a dispensing
providence with a vassal in tow. Nicholas followed obediently. He was
sufficiently cowed into non-resistance, and he felt a wholesome awe of
his defender, albeit he wished that it had been a boy like himself
instead of a slip of a girl with short skirts and a sunbonnet. At the
bottom of his heart there existed an instinctive contempt of the sex
which Eugenia represented, developed by the fact that it was not force
but weakness that had vanquished his victorious opponent. Dudley Webb
was a gentleman, and only a bully would strike a girl, even if she were
a spitfire--the term by which he characterised Eugenia. He remembered
suddenly her exultant, "an' you can't hit me back!" and it seemed to him
that, even in the righteous cause of his deliverance, she had taken an
unfair and feminine advantage of the handsome boy for whom he cherished
a shrinking admiration.

As for Eugenia herself, she was troubled by no such misgivings. She
walked slightly in front of him, her blue skirt swinging briskly from
side to side, her white sunbonnet hanging by its strings from her
shoulders. Above the starched ruffles rose her small dark head and white
profile, and Nicholas could see the determined curve of her chin and the
humorous tremor of her nostril. It was a vivid little face, devoid of
colour except for the warm mouth, and sparkling with animation which
burned steadily at the white heat of intensity--but to Nicholas she was
only a plain, dark, little girl, with an unhealthy pallor of complexion.
He was grateful, nevertheless, and when his first regret that she was
not a boy was over he experienced a thrill of affection. It was the
first time that any one had deliberately taken his part in the face of
opposing odds, and the stand seemed to bring him closer to his
companion. He held her books tightly, and his face softened as he looked
at her, until it was transfigured by the warmth of his emotion. Then, as
they passed the college grounds, where a knot of students greeted
Eugenia hilariously, and turned upon the Old Stage Road, he reached out
timidly to take the small hand hanging by her side.

"It's better walkin' on this side the road," he said with a mild
assumption of masculine supremacy. "I wouldn't walk in the dust."

Eugenia looked at him gravely and drew her hand away.

"You mustn't do that," she responded severely. "When I said you weren't
common I didn't mean that you really weren't, you know; because, of
course, you are. I jest meant that I wouldn't let them say so."

Nicholas stood in the centre of the road and stared at her, his face
flushing and a slow rage creeping into his eyes.

For a moment he stood in trembling silence. Then he threw the books from
him into the sand at her feet, and with a choking sob sped past her to
vanish amid a whirl of dust in the sunny distance.

Eugenia looked thoughtfully down upon her scattered possessions. She was
all alone upon the highway, and around her the open fields rolled off
into the green of far-off forests. The sunshine fell hotly over her, and
straight ahead the white road lay like a living thing.

She stooped, gravely gathered up the books, and walked resolutely on her
way, a cloud of yellow butterflies fluttering like loosened petals of
full-blown buttercups about her head.




V


Battie Hall was a square white frame house with bright-green window
shutters and a deep front porch, supported by heavy pillars, and reached
from the gravelled walk below by a flight of rugged stone steps. In the
rear of the house, through which a wide hall ran, dividing the rooms of
the first floor, there was another porch similar to the one at the
front, except that the pillars were hidden in musk roses and the long
benches at either side were of plain, unpainted pine. At the foot of the
back steps a narrow, well-trodden path led to the vegetable garden,
which was separated from the yard by what was called "Cattle Lane"--a
name derived from the morning and evening passage of the cows on their
way to and from the pasture.

Beginning at the gate into the garden, where the tall white palings were
gay with hollyhocks and heavy-headed sunflowers, a grapevine trellis
extended to the farmyard at the end of the lane, whence an overgrown
walk led across tangled meadows to the negro "quarters"--a long,
whitewashed row of almost deserted cabins. Since the close of the war
the "quarters" had fallen partly into disuse and had decayed rapidly,
though some few were still tenanted by the former slaves, who gathered
as of old in the doorways of an evening to strum upon broken-stringed
banjos and to wrap the hair of their small offspring. Beyond this row
there was a slight elevation called "Hickory Hill," where Uncle Ishmael
had lived for more than seventy years; and at the foot of the hill, on
the other side, near "Sweet Gum Spring," there were several neatly
patched log cabins occupied by the house servants, who held in social
contempt the field hands in the neighbouring "quarters." Overlooking the
"Sweet Gum Spring," on a loftier hill, was the family graveyard, which
was walled off from the orchard near by, where the twisted old fruit
trees had long since yielded the larger part of their abundance.

At the front of the Hall the view was vastly different. There the great
blue-grass lawn was thickly studded with ancient elms and maples, whose
shade fell like a blanket upon the velvety sod beneath. The gravelled
walk, beginning at the front steps, was bordered on either side by rows
of closely clipped box, which ended in the long avenue of cedars leading
from the lawn to the distant turnpike. To the right of the house there
were three pointed aspens, which shivered like skeletons in silver,
holding grimly aloof from the vivid pink of the crêpe myrtle at their
feet. Beyond them was the well-house, with a long moss-grown trough
where the horses and the cows came to drink, and across the road began
the cornlands, which stretched in rhythmic undulations to the dark belt
of the pine forest. On the left of the box walk, in a direct line from
the three aspens, towered a huge sycamore, and from one of its
protecting arms, shaded by large fan-like leaves, a child's swing
dangled by a thick hemp rope. Near the sycamore, where an old oak had
fallen, the rotting stump was hidden by a high "rockery," edged with
conch shells, and over the rough gray rocks a tangle of garden flowers
ran wild--sweet-william, petunias, phlox, and the mossy stems of red and
yellow portulaca. On the western side of the house there was a spreading
mimosa tree, its sensitive branches brushing the green shutters of a
window in the second story.

The Hall had been built by the general's father when, because of family
dissensions, he had decided to move from a central county to the more
thinly settled country surrounding Kingsborough. There the general had
passed his boyhood, and there he had left his wife when he had gone to
the war. At the beginning of the struggle he had freed his slaves and
buckled on his sword.

"They may have the negroes, and welcome," he had said to the judge. "Do
you think I'd fight for a damned darkey? It's the principle, sir--the
principle!"

And the judge, who had not freed his servants, but who would as soon
have thought of using a profane word as of alluding in disrespectful
terms to a family portrait, had replied gravely:

"My dear Tom, you will find principle much better to fight for than to
live on."

But the general had gone with much valour and more vehemence. He had
enlisted as a private, had risen within a couple of years to a
colonelcy, and had been raised to the rank of general by the unanimous
voice of his neighbours upon his return home. After an enthusiastic
reception at Kingsborough he had mounted a heavy-weight horse and ridden
out to the Hall, to find the grounds a tangle of weeds and his wife
with the pallor of death upon her brow. She had rallied at his coming,
had lingered some sad years an invalid in the great room next the
parlour, and had died quietly at last as she knelt in prayer beside her
high white bed.

For days after this the empty house was like a coffin. The children ran
in tears through the shuttered rooms, and the servants lost their
lingering shred of discipline. When the funeral was over, the general
made some spasmodic show of authority, but his heart was not in it, and
he wavered for lack of the sustaining hold of his wife's frail hand. He
dismissed the overseer and undertook to some extent the management of
the farm, but the crops failed and the hay rotted in the fields before
it was got into the barn. Then, as things were galloping from bad to
worse, a letter came from his sister, Miss Christina, and in a few days
she arrived with a cartload of luggage and a Maltese cat in a wicker
basket. From the moment when she stepped out of the carriage at the end
of the avenue and ascended the box-trimmed walk to the stone steps, the
difficulties disentangled and the domestic problems dwindled into the
simplest of arithmetical sums. By some subtle law of the influence of
the energetic she assumed at once the rights of authority. From the
master of the house to the field hands in the "quarters," all bent to
her regenerating rule. She opened the windows in the airy rooms, cleaned
off the storeroom shelves with soda and water, and put the marauding
small negroes to weeding the lawn. Before her passionate purification
the place was purged of the dust of years. The hardwood floors of the
wide old halls began to shine like mirrors, the assortment of odds and
ends in the attic was relegated to an outhouse, and even the general's
aunt, Miss Griselda Grigsby, was turned unceremoniously out of her
apartment before the all-pervading soap-suds of cleaning day.

As for the servants, a sudden miraculous zeal possessed them. Within a
fortnight the garden rows were hoed free from grass, the hops were
gathered from the fence, and the weeds on the lawn vanished beneath
small black fingers. Even the annual threshing of the harvest was
accomplished under the overseeing eye of "Miss Chris," as she was called
by the coloured population. During the week that the old machine poured
out its chaffless wheat and the driver whistled in the centre of the
treadmill Miss Chris appeared at the barn at noon each day to warn the
hands against waste of time and to see that the mules were well watered.

But the revolutions without were as naught to the internal ones. Aunt
Verbeny, the cook, whose tyranny had extended over thirty years, was
assisted from her pedestal, and the hen-house keys were removed from the
nail of the kitchen wall.

"This will never do, Verbeny," said Miss Chris a month after her
arrival. "We could not possibly have eaten three dozen chickens within
the last week. I am afraid you take them home without asking me."

Aunt Verbeny, a fat old woman with a shining black skin, smoothed her
checked apron with offended dignity.

"Hi! Miss Chris, ain't I de cook?" she exclaimed.

But Miss Chris preserved her ground.

"That is no excuse for you taking what doesn't belong to you," she
replied severely. "If this keeps up I shall be obliged to let Delphy do
the cooking. There won't be a chicken in the hen-house by the end of the
month."

Aunt Verbeny still smoothed her apron, but her authority was shaken, and
she felt it. She gave a slow grunt of dissatisfaction.

"Dese ain't de doin's I'se used ter," she protested, and then, beneath
the undaunted eyes of Miss Chris, she melted into propitiation.

"Des' let dat ar chicken alont, Miss Chris," she said, skilfully
reducing the charge to a single offence. "Des' let dat ar chicken alont.
'Tain' no use yo' rilin' yo'se'f 'bout dat. Hit's done en it's been
done. Hit don't becomst de quality ter fluster demse'ves over de gwines
on uv er low-lifeted fowl. You des' bresh yo'se'f down an steddy like
hit ain' been fool you ef you knowed yo'se'f. You des' let dat ar
chicken be er little act uv erdultery betweenst you en me. Ef'n it's
gone, hit'll stay gone!"

Whereupon Miss Chris retreated, leaving her opponent in possession of
the kitchen floor.

But from this day forth the hen-house was locked at night and unlocked
in the morning by the hand of Miss Chris, and Aunt Verbeny's overweening
ill-temper diminished with her authority.

Miss Chris had been a beauty in her day, but as she passed middle age
the family failing seized upon her, and she grew huge and unwieldy, the
disproportion of her enormous figure to her small feet giving her an
awkward, waddling walk.

She had a profusion of silvery-white hair, worn in fluffy curls about
her large pink face, soft brown eyes, and a full double chin that fell
over a round cameo brooch bearing the head of Minerva set in a plain
gold band. In winter she wore gowns of black Henrietta cloth, made with
plain bodices and full plaited skirts; in summer she wore the same
skirts with loosely fitting white linen sacques, trimmed in delicate
embroideries, with muslin ruffles falling over her plump hands. When she
came to the Hall she brought with her innumerable reminiscences of her
childhood, which she told in a musical voice with girlish laughter.

After his sister's arrival the general discontinued his fitful
overseering. He rose early and spent his long days sitting upon the
front porch, smoking an old briar pipe and reading the Richmond papers.
Occasionally he would ride at a jogging pace round the fields, giving
casual directions to the workers, but as his weight increased he found
it difficult to mount into the saddle, and, at last, desisted from the
attempt. He preferred to sit in peace in his cane rocking chair, looking
down the box walk into the twilight of the cedar avenue, or gazing
placidly beyond the aspens and the well-house to the streaked ribbons of
the ripening corn. It was said that he had never been the same man since
the death of his wife. Certainly he laughed as heartily and his jovial
face had taken a ruddier tint, but there was a superficiality in his
exuberant cheerfulness which told that it was not well rooted below the
surface. His jokes were as ready as ever, but he had fallen into an
absent-minded habit of repetition, and sometimes repeated the same
stories at breakfast and supper. He talked freely of his dead wife, he
even made ill-placed jests about his widowerhood, and he never failed to
kiss a pair of red lips when the chance offered; but, for all that, his
gaze often wandered past the huge sycamore to the family graveyard,
where rank periwinkle grew and mocking-birds nested. Through the long
summer not a Sunday passed that he did not take fresh flowers to one of
the neatly trimmed mounds where the marble headpiece read:

         "AMELIA TUCKER,

          BELOVED WIFE OF

          THOMAS BATTLE,

         DIED APRIL 3RD., 18--.

'_I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith
              the Lord._'"

Sometimes the children were with him, but usually he went alone, and
once or twice he returned with red eyelids and asked for a julep.

There was little to fill his life now, and he divided it between Bernard
and Eugenia, whom he adored, and the negroes, whom he reviled for
diversion and spoiled to make amends.

"They will break me!" he would declare a dozen times a day. "They will
turn me out of house and home. Here's old Sambo's Claudius come back and
moved into the quarters. He hasn't a cent to his name, and he's the most
no 'count scamp on earth. It's worse than before the war--upon my soul
it is! Then they lived on me and I got an odd piece of work out of
them. Now they live on me and don't do a damned lick!"

"My dear Tom!" Miss Chris cheerfully remonstrated. She had long been
reconciled to her brother's swearing propensities, which she regarded as
an amiable eccentricity to be overlooked by a special indulgence
accorded the male sex, but she never knew just how to meet him in a
discussion of the servants.

"What is to be done about it?" she inquired gravely. "Claudius left here
at the beginning of the war, Aunt Griselda says, and he has never been
back until now. It seems he has brought his family. He has
lung-trouble."

"Done about it!" repeated the general heatedly. "What's to be done about
it? Why, the rascal can't starve. I've just told Sampson to wheel him
down a barrel of meal. Oh, they'll break me! I shan't have a morsel
left!"

The next time it was an opposite grievance.

"What do you reckon's happened now?" he asked, marching into the brick
storeroom, where his sister was slicing ripe, red tomatoes into a blue
china bowl. "What do you think that fool Ish has done?"

Miss Chris looked up attentively, her large, fresh-coloured face
expressing mild apprehension. She had rolled back her linen sleeves, and
the juice of the tomatoes stained her full, dimpled wrists.

"He hasn't killed himself?" she inquired anxiously.

"Killed himself?" roared the general. "He'll live forever. I don't
believe he'd die if he were strung up with a halter round his neck.
He's moved off."

"Moved off!" echoed Miss Chris faintly. "Why, I believe Uncle Ish was
living in that cabin on Hickory Hill before I was born. I remember going
up there to help him gather hickory nuts when I wasn't six years old. I
couldn't have been six because mammy Betsey was with me, and she died
before I was seven. I declare there were always more nuts on those trees
than any I ever saw--"

But the general broke in upon her reminiscences, and she took up a fresh
tomato and peeled it carefully with a sharp-edged knife.

"Some idiots got after him," said the general, "and told him if he went
on living on my land he'd go back to slavery, and, bless your life, he
has gone--gone to that little one-room shanty where his daughter used to
live, between my place and Burr's--as if I'd have him," he concluded
wrathfully. "I wouldn't own that fool again if he dropped into my lap
straight from heaven!"

Miss Chris laughed merrily.

"It is the last place he would be likely to drop from," she returned;
"but I'll call him up and talk with him. It is a pity for him to be
moving off at his age."

So Uncle Ishmael was summoned up to the porch, and Miss Chris explained
the error of his ways, but to no purpose.

"I ain' got no fault ter fine," he repeated over and over again,
scratching his grizzled head. "I ain' got no fault ter fine wid you.
You've been used me moughty well, en I'se pow'ful 'bleeged ter you--en
Marse Tom, he's a gent'mun ef ever I seed one. I ain' go no fault ter
fine."

The general lost his temper and started up.

"Then what do you mean by turning fool at your age?" he demanded
angrily. "Haven't I given you a roof over your head all these years?"

"Dat's so, suh."

"And food to eat?"

"Dat's so."

"And never asked you to do a lick of work since you got the rheumatism?"

"Dat's es true es de Gospel."

"Then what do you mean by going off like mad to that little, broken-down
shanty with half the roof gone?"

Uncle Ishmael shuffled his heavy feet and scratched his head again.

"Hit's de trufe, Marse Tom," he said at last. "Hit's de Gospel trufe. I
ain' had so much ter eat sence I'se gone off, en I ain' had much uv er
roof ter kiver me, en I ain' had nuttin' ter w'ar ter speak on--but, fo'
de Lawd, Marse Tom, freedom it are er moughty good thing."

Then the general flew into the house in a rage and Uncle Ishmael left,
followed by two small negroes, bearing on their heads the donations made
by Miss Chris to his welfare.

On the day that Eugenia encountered Nicholas at school the general was
sitting, as usual, in his rocking chair upon the front porch, when he
saw the flutter of a blue skirt, and Eugenia emerged from the avenue and
came up the walk between the stiff rows of box. It was two o'clock, and
the general was peacefully awaiting the sound of the dinner bell, but
at the sight of Eugenia his peacefulness departed, and he called
angrily:

"Eugie, where's Bernard?"

"Comin'."

"Coming!" returned the general indignantly. "Haven't I told you a dozen
times not to walk along that road by yourself? Why didn't you wait for
the carriage? Are you never going to mind what I say to you?"

Eugenia came up the steps and threw her books on one of the long green
benches. Then she seated herself in a rocking chair and untied her
sunbonnet.

"I wa'n't by myself," she said. "A boy was with me."

"A boy? Where is he?"

"He ran away."

The general's great head went back, and he shook with laughter. "Bless
my soul! What did he mean by that? What boy was it, daughter?"

Eugenia sat upright in the high rocker, fanning her heated face with her
sunbonnet.

"The Burr boy," she answered.

The general gasped for breath, and turned towards the hall.

"Come out here, Chris!" he called. "Here's Eugie been walking home with
the Burr boy!"

In a moment Miss Chris's large figure appeared in the doorway, and she
handed a brimming mint julep to the general.

"I don't know what Eugie can be made of," she remarked. "Amos Burr was
overseer for the Carringtons before he got that place of his own, and I
remember just as well as if it were yesterday old Mr. Phil Carrington
telling me once, when I was on a visit there, that the more his man Burr
worked the less he accomplished. But, as for Eugenia, that isn't the
worst about her. Just the other morning, when I was looking out of the
storeroom window, I saw her with her arm round the neck of Aunt
Verbeny's little Suke. I declare I was so upset I let the quart pot fall
into the potato bin!"

"But there isn't anybody else, Aunt Chris," protested Eugenia, looking
up from her father's julep, which she was tasting. "And I'm 'bliged to
have a bosom friend."

The general shook until his face was purple and the ice jingled in the
glass.

"Bosom friend, you puss!" he roared. "Why can't you choose a bosom
friend of your own colour? What do you want with a bosom friend as black
as the ace of spades?"

"O papa, she ain't black; she's jes' yellow-brown."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Eugie," said Miss Chris severely.
"Now go upstairs and wash your face and hands before dinner. It is
almost ready. I wonder where Bernard is!"

"Can't I wait twell the bell rings?" Eugenia asked; but Miss Chris shook
her head decisively.

"Eugenia, will you never stop talking like a darkey?" she demanded. "How
often must I tell you that there's no such word as 'twell'? Now, go
right straight upstairs."

Eugenia rose obediently and went into the hall. She had learned from her
father and the servants not to dispute the authority of Miss Chris,
though she yielded to it with a mild surprise at her own docility.

"She don't really manage me," she had once confided to Delphy, the
washerwoman, "but I jes' plays that she does."




VI


When Eugenia came downstairs she found the family seated at dinner, Miss
Chris and her father beaming upon each other across a dish of fried
chicken and a home-cured ham. Bernard was on Miss Chris's right hand,
and on the other side of the table Eugenia's seat separated the general
from Aunt Griselda, who sat severely buttering her toast before a brown
earthenware teapot ornamented by a raised design of Rebecca at the well.
Aunt Griselda was a lean, dried-up old lady, with a sharp, curved nose
like the beak of a bird, and smoothly parted hair brushed low over her
ears and held in place by a tortoise-shell comb. There were deep
channels about her eyes, worn by the constant falling of acrid tears,
and her cheeks were wrinkled and yellowed like old parchment.

Twenty years ago, when the general had first brought home his young
wife, before her buoyancy had faltered, and before the five little
head-boards to the five stillborn children had been set up amid the
periwinkle in the family graveyard, Aunt Griselda had written from the
home of her sister to say that she would stop over at Battle Hall on her
way to Richmond.

The general had received the news joyfully, and the best chamber had
been made ready by the hospitable hands of his young wife. Delicate,
lavender-scented linen had been put on the old tester-bed and curtains
of flowered chintz tied back from the window seats. Amelia Battle had
placed a bowl of tea-roses upon the dressing table and gone graciously
down to the avenue to welcome her guest. From the family carriage Aunt
Griselda had emerged soured and eccentric. She had gone up to the best
chamber, unpacked her trunks, hung up her bombazine skirts in the
closet, ordered green tea and toast, and settled herself for the
remainder of her days. That was twenty years ago, and she still slept in
the best chamber, and still ordered tea and toast at the table. She had
grown sourer with years and more eccentric with authority, but the
general never failed to treat her crotchets with courtesy or to open the
door for her when she came and went. To the mild complaints of Miss
Chris and the protestations of Eugenia he returned the invariable
warning: "She is our guest--remember what is due to a guest, my dears."

And when Miss Chris placidly suggested that the privileges of guestship
wore threadbare when they were stretched over twenty years, and Eugenia
fervently hoped that there were no visitors in heaven, the general
responded to each in turn:

"It is the right of a guest to determine the length of his stay, and, as
a Virginian, my house is open as long as it has a roof over it."

So Aunt Griselda drank her green tea in acrid silence, turning at
intervals to reprove Bernard for taking too large mouthfuls or to
request Eugenia to remove her elbows from the table.

To-day, when Eugenia descended, she was gazing stonily into Miss
Chris's genial face, and listening constrainedly to a story at which the
general was laughing heartily.

"Yes, I never look at these forks of the bead pattern that I don't see
Aunt Callowell," Miss Chris was concluding. "She never used any other
pattern, and I remember when Cousin Bob Baker once sent her a set of
teaspoons with a different border, she returned them to Richmond to be
exchanged. Do you remember the time she came to mother's when we were
children, Tom? Eugie, will you have breast or leg?"

"I don't think I could have been at home," said the general, his face
growing animated, as it always did, in a discussion of old times; "but I
do remember once, when I was at Uncle Robert's, they sent me eighteen
miles on horseback for the doctor, because Aunt Callowell had such a
queer feeling in her side when she started to walk. I can see her now
holding her side and saying: 'I can't possibly take a step! Robert, I
can't take a step!' And when I brought the doctor eighteen miles from
home, on his old gray mare, he found that she'd put a shoe on one foot
and a slipper on the other."

The general threw back his head and laughed until the table groaned,
while Miss Chris's double chin shook softly over her cameo brooch.

Aunt Griselda wiped her eyes on the border of her handkerchief.

"Aunt Cornelia Callowell was a righteous woman," she murmured. "I never
thought that I should hear her ridiculed in the house of her
great-nephew. She scalloped me a flannel petticoat with her own hands.
Eugenia, in my day little girls didn't reach for the butter. They waited
until it was handed to them."

Congo, the butler, rushed to Eugenia's assistance, and the general shook
his finger at her and formed the word "guest" with his mouth. Miss Chris
changed the subject by begging Aunt Griselda to have a wing of chicken.

"I don't believe in so much dieting," she said cheerfully. "I think your
nerves would be better if you ate more. Just try a brown wing."

"I know my nerves are bad," Aunt Griselda rejoined, still wiping her
eyes, "though it is hard to be accused of a temper before my own nephew.
But I know I am a burden, and I have overstayed my welcome. Let me go."

"Why, Aunt Griselda?" remonstrated Miss Chris in hurt tones. "You know I
didn't accuse you of anything. I only meant that you would feel better
if you didn't drink so much tea and ate more meat--"

"I am not too old to take a hint," replied Aunt Griselda. "I haven't
reached my dotage yet, and I can see when I am a burden. Here, Congo,
you may put my teapot away."

"O Lord!" gasped the general tragically; and rising to the occasion, he
said hurriedly: "By the way, Chris, they told me at the post-office
to-day that old Dr. Smith was dead. It was only last week that I met him
on his way to town with his niece's daughter, and he told me that he had
never been in better health in his life."

"Dear me!" exclaimed Miss Chris, holding a large spoonful of
raspberries poised above the dish to which she was helping. "Why, old
Dr. Smith attended me forty years ago when I had measles. I remember he
made me lie in bed with blankets over me, though it was August, and he
wouldn't let me drink anything except hot flax-seed tea. They say all
that has been changed in this generation--"

"Leave me plenty of room for cream, Aunt Chris," broke in Bernard, with
an anxious eye on Miss Chris's absent-minded manipulations. She reached
for the round, old silver pitcher, and poured the yellow cream on the
sugared berries without pausing in her soft, monotonous flow of words.

"But even in those days Dr. Smith was behind the times, and he has been
so ever since. He used to say that chloroform was invented by infidels,
and he would not let them give it to his son, Lawrence, when he broke
his leg on the threshing machine. It was a mania with him, for, when I
was nursing in the hospitals during the war, he told me with his own
lips that he believed the Lord was on our side because we didn't have
chloroform."

"He had a good many odd ideas," said the general, "but he is dead now,
poor man."

"He raised up my dear father when he was struck down with paralysis,"
murmured Aunt Griselda.

When dinner was over the general returned to the front porch, and
Eugenia and the puppy went with Bernard to the orchard to look for green
apples.

They started out in single file; Bernard, a bright-faced, snub-nosed boy
with a girlish mouth, a little in advance, Eugenia following, and the
puppy at her heels. On the way across the meadow, where myriads of
grasshoppers darted with a whirring noise beneath the leaves of coarse
mullein plants or the slender, unopened pods of milkweed, the puppy made
sudden desperate skirmishes into the tangled pathside, pointing
ineffectually at the heavy-legged insects, his red tongue lolling and
his short tail wagging. Up the steep ascent of the orchard a rocky trail
ran, bordered by a rail fence. From the point of the hill one could see
the adjoining country unrolled like a map, olive heights melting into
emerald valleys, bare clearings into luxuriant crops, running a
chromatic scale from the dry old battlefields surrounding Kingsborough
to the arable "bottoms" beside the enrichening river.

After an unsuccessful search for cherries Bernard climbed a tree where
summer apples hung green, and tossed the fruit to Eugenia, who held up
her blue skirt beneath the overhanging boughs. The puppy, having dodged
in astonishment a stray apple, went off after the silvery track of a
snail.

"That's enough," called Bernard presently, and he descended and filled
his pockets from Eugenia's lap. "They set my teeth on edge, anyway. Got
any salt?"

Eugenia drew a small folded envelope from her pocket. Then she threw
away her apple and pointed to the little brook at the foot of the hill.
"There's that red-winged blackbird in the bulrushes again. I believe
it's got a nest."

And they started in a run down the hillside, the puppy waddling behind
with shrill, impertinent barks.

At the bottom of the hill they lost the blackbird and found Nicholas
Burr, who was lying face downwards upon the earth, a fishing line at his
side.

"He's crying," said Eugenia in a high whisper.

Nicholas rolled over, saw them, and got up, wiping his eyes on the
sleeve of his shirt.

"There warn't nobody lookin'," he said defiantly.

"You're too big to cry," observed Bernard dispassionately, munching a
green apple he had taken from his pocket. "You're as big as I am, and I
haven't cried since I was six years old. Eugie cries."

"I don't!" protested Eugenia vehemently. "I reckon you'd cry too if they
made you sit in the house the whole afternoon and hem cup-towels."

"I'm a boy, Miss Spitfire. Boys don't sew. I saw Nick Burr milking,
though, one day. What made you milk, Nick?"

"Ma did."

"I'd like to see anybody make me milk. You're jes' the same as a girl."

"I ain't!"

"You are!"

"I ain't!"

"'Spose you fight it out," suggested Eugenia, with an eye for sport,
settling herself upon the ground with Jim in her lap.

Nicholas picked up his fishing line and wound it slowly round the cork.
"There's a powerful lot of minnows in this creek," he remarked amicably.
"When you lean over that log you can catch 'em in your hat."

"Let's do it," said Eugenia, starting up, and they went out upon the
slippery log between the reedy banks. Over the smooth, pebbly bed of
the stream flashed the shining bodies of hundreds of minnows, passing
back and forth with brisk wriggles of their fine, steel-coloured tails.
On the Battle side of the bank a huge, blue-winged dragonfly buzzed
above the flaunting red and yellow faces of three tiger-lilies.

Jim sat on the brookside and watched the minnows, having ventured midway
upon the log, to retreat at the sight of his own reflection in the
water.

"He's a coward," said Bernard teasingly, alluding to the recreant Jim.
"I wouldn't have a dog that was a coward."

"He ain't a coward," returned Eugenia passionately. "He jes' don't like
looking at his own face, that's all. Here, Nick, hand me your hat."

Nick obediently gave her his hat, and Eugenia leaned over the stream,
her bare arms and vivid face mirrored against the silvery minnows, when
a shrill call came from the house.

"Nick! Who-a Ni-ck!"

"That's Sairy Jane," said Nicholas, reaching for his hat. "Ma wants me."

"Who is Sairy Jane?"

"Sister."

Eugenia handed him his dripping hat, and stood shaking her fingers free
from the sparkling drops.

"Will you come and fish with me to-morrow?" she asked.

"If I ain't got to work in the field--"

"Don't work."

"Can't help it."

The call was repeated, and Nicholas sped over the mossy log and across
the ploughed field, while Bernard and Eugenia toiled up the hillside.

As they passed the Sweet Gum Spring they saw Delphy, the washerwoman,
standing in her doorway, quarrelling with her son-in-law, Moses, who was
hoeing a small garden patch in the rear of an adjoining cabin. Delphy
was a large mulatto woman, with a broad, flat bosom and enormous hands
that looked as if they had been parboiled into a livid blue tint.

"'Tain' no use fer to hoe groun' dat ain' got no richness," she was
saying, shaking her huge head until the dipper hanging on the lintel of
the door rattled, "en'tain' no use preachin' ter a nigger dat ain' got
no gumption. Es de tree fall, so hit' gwine ter lay, en es a fool's done
been born, so he gwine ter die. 'Tain' no use a-tryin' fer to do over a
job dat de Lawd done slighted. You may ding about hit en you may dung
about hit, but ef'n it won't, hit won't."

Moses, a meek-looking negro with an honest face, hoed silently, making
no response to his mother-in-law's vituperations, which grew voluble
before his non-resistance.

"Dar ain' no use er my frettin' en perfumin' over dat ar nigger," she
concluded, as if addressing a third person. "He wuz born a syndicate en
he'll die er syndicate. De Debbil, he ain' gwine tu'n 'm en de Lawd he
can't. De preachin' it runs off 'im same es water off er duck's back.
I'se done talked ter him day in en day out twell dar ain' no breff lef
fer me ter blow wid, an' he ain' changed a hyar f'om what de Lawd made
'im. Seems like he ain' got de sperit uv--"

"Why, Delphy!" exclaimed Bernard, interrupting the flow of speech.
"What's the matter with Moses?"

Delphy snorted contemptuously and took breath for procedure, when the
sharp cry of a baby came from Moses' cabin, and Eugenia broke in
excitedly:

"Why, there's a baby in there, Delphy! Whose baby is that?"

"Git er long wid you, chile," said Delphy. "You knows er plum sight mo'
now'n you ought ter." Then she added with a snort: "Hit's es black es er
crow's foot."

"Is it Betsey's baby?"

"I reckon'tis. Moses he says ez what'tis, but he's de mos' outlandish
nigger on dis yer place. Dar ain' no relyin' on him, noways."

"When did it come, Delphy? Who brought it? I saw Dr. Debs yesterday, an'
his saddle-bag bulged mightily."

"De Lawd didn't brung hit," returned Delphy emphatically. "De Lawd
wouldn't er teched hit wid er ten-foot pole. Dis yer Moses, he ain' wuth
de salt dat's put in his bread. He's de wuss er de hull lot--"

"Why doesn't Betsey get rid of him?" asked Bernard, eyeing the shrinking
Moses with disfavour. "I heard Aunt Chris say that Mrs. Willie Wilson in
Richmond got a divorce from her husband for good and all--"

"Lawdy, chile! Huccome you think I'se gwine ter pay fer a dervoge fer
sech er low-lifeted creetur ez dat? He ain' wuth no dervogin', he ain'.
When it come ter dervogin', I'll dervoge 'im wid my fis' en foot--"

Here the baby cried again, and the irate Delphy disappeared into Moses'
cabin, while the meek-looking son-in-law hoed the garden patch and
muttered beneath his breath.

The children passed the spring, crossed the meadow, and followed the
grapevine trellis to the back steps, when Eugenia rushed through the
wide hall with an impetuous flutter of short skirts.

"Papa!" she cried, bursting upon the general as he sat smoking upon the
front porch. "What do you think has happened? There's a new baby came to
Moses' cabin, an' Delphy says it's as black as--"

"Well, I am blessed!" groaned the general, knocking the ashes from his
pipe. "Another mouth to feed. Eugie, they'll ruin me yet."

"I reckon they will," returned Eugenia hopelessly. She seated herself
upon the topmost step and made a place for Jim beside her.

The general was silent for some time, smoking thoughtfully and staring
past the aspens and the well-house to the waving cornfield. When he
spoke it was with embarrassed hesitation.

"I say, daughter."

Eugenia looked up eagerly.

"Didn't that spotted cow of Moses' die last week?"

"That it did," replied Eugenia emphatically. "It got loose in your
clover, pasture and ate itself too full. Moses says it bu'st."

"Pish!" exclaimed the general angrily. "My clover! I tell you, they
won't leave me a roof over my head. They'll eat me into the poorhouse.
But I'll turn them off. I'll send them packing, bag and baggage. My
clover!"

"Moses ain't got much of a garden patch," said Eugenia. "It looks mighty
poor. The potato-bugs ate all his potatoes."

The general was silent again.

"I say, daughter," he began at last, blowing a heavy cloud of smoke upon
the air, "the next time you go by Sweet Gum Spring you had just as well
tell Moses that I can let him have a side of bacon if he wants it. The
rascal can't starve. But they won't leave me a mouthful--not one. And
Eugie--"

"Yes, sir."

"You needn't mention it to your Aunt Chris--"

At that instant a little barefooted negro came running across the lawn
from the spring-house, a large tin pail in his hand.

"Here, boy!" called the general. "Where're you off to? What have you got
in that pail?"

"It's Jake," said Eugenia in a whisper, while Jim barked frantically
from the shelter of her arms. "He's Delphy's Jake."

The small negro stood grinning in the walk, his white eyeballs circling
in their sockets. "Hit's Miss Chris, suh," he said at last.

"Miss Chris, you rascal!" shouted the general. "Do you expect me to
believe you've got Miss Chris in that pail? Open it, sir; open it!"

Jake showed a shining row of ivory teeth and stood shaking the pail from
side to side.

"Miss Chris, she gun hit ter me, suh," he explained. "Hit's Miss Chris
herse'f dat's done sont me ter tote dish yer buttermilk ter Unk Mose."

"Bless my soul!" cried the general wrathfully. "Get away with you! The
whole place is bent on ruining me. I'll be in the poorhouse before the
week's up." And he strode indoors in a rage.




VII


Twice a year, on fine days in spring and fall, Aunt Griselda's bombazine
dresses were taken from the whitewashed closet and hung out to air upon
the clothesline at the back of the house, while pungent odours of tar
and camphor were exhaled from the full black folds. On these days Aunt
Griselda would remain in her room, sorting faded relics which she took
from a cedar chest and spread beside her on the floor. The door was kept
locked at such times, but once Eugenia, who had gone with Congo to carry
Aunt Griselda her toast and tea, had caught a glimpse of a yellowed
swiss muslin frock and the leather case of a daguerreotype containing
the picture of a round-eyed girl with rosy cheeks. Aunt Griselda had
hidden them hastily away at the child's entrance--hidden them with that
nervous, awkward haste which dreads a dawning jest of itself; but
Eugenia had seen that her old eyes were red and her voice more rasping
than usual.

Sixty years ago Aunt Griselda had had her romance, and she still kept
her love-letters tied up with discoloured ribbons and laid away in the
cedar chest. It was but the skeleton of a love story--the adolescent
ardours of a high-spirited country girl and the high-spirited son of a
neighbouring farmer. When the quarrel came the letters were overlooked
when the ring went back. Griselda Grigsby had tossed them carelessly
into the cedar chest and gone out to forget them. Her heart had not
been deeply touched and it soon mended. No other lovers came, and she
lived her quiet life in her father's house, gathering garden flowers for
the great, blue bowls in the parlour, teaching the catechism to small
black slaves, and making stiff, old-fashioned samplers in crewels. The
high-spirited lover had loved elsewhere and died of a fever, and, beyond
a passing regret, she thought little of him. There were nearer
interests, and she was still the petted daughter of her father's
house--the eldest and the best beloved. Then the crash came. The old
people passed away, the house changed hands, Aunt Griselda was stranded
upon the high tide of hospitality--and crewel work went out of fashion.

In her sister's home she became a constant guest--one to be offered the
favoured share and to be treated with tender, increasing tolerance--not
to be loved. Since the death of her parents none had loved her, though
many had borne gently with her spoiled fancies. But her coming in had
brought no light, and her going out had left nothing dark. She was old
and ill-tempered and bitter of speech, and, though all doors opened
hospitably at her approach, all closed quickly when she was gone. Her
spoiled youth had left her sensitive to trivial stings, unforgivable to
fancied wrongs. In a childish oversight she detected hidden malice and
implacable hate in a thoughtless jest. Her bitterness and her years
waxed greater together, and she lost alike her youth and her
self-control. When she had yearned for passionate affection she had
found kindly tolerance, and the longings of her hidden nature, which
none knew, were expressed in rasping words and acrid tears. Once, some
years after Bernard's birth, she had called him into her room as she sat
among her relics, and had shown him the daguerreotype.

"It's pitty lady," the child had lisped, and she had caught him suddenly
to her lean old breast, but he had broken into peevish cries and
struggled free, tearing with his foot the ruffle of the swiss muslin
gown.

"Oo ain't pitty lady," he had said, and Aunt Griselda had risen and
pushed him into the hall with sharp, scolding words, and had sat down to
darn the muslin ruffle with delicate, old-fashioned stitches.

It was only when all living love had failed her that she returned to the
dead. She had gathered the letters of nearly sixty years ago from the
bottom of the cedar chest, reading them through her spectacles with
bleared, watery eyes. Those subtle sentimentalities which linger like
aromas in a heart too aged for passion were liberated by the bundle of
yellow scrawls written by hands that were dust. As she sat in her stiff
bombazine skirts beside the opened chest, peering with worry-ravaged
face at the old letters, she forgot that she was no longer one with the
girl in the muslin frock, and that the inciter of this exuberant emotion
was as dead as the emotion itself.

When the dresses were brought up to her she would put them on again and
go down to flinch before kindly eyes and to make embittered speeches in
her high, shrill voice. Outwardly she grew more soured and more
eccentric. On mild summer evenings she would come down stairs with her
head wrapped in a pink knitted "nubia," and stroll back and forth along
the gravelled walk, her gaunt figure passing into the dusk of the cedar
avenue and emerging like the erratic shadow of one of the sombre trees.

Sometimes Eugenia joined her, but Bernard, her favourite, held shyly
aloof. In her exercise she seldom spoke, and her words were peevish
ones, but there was grim pathos in her carriage as she moved slowly back
and forth between the straight rows of box.

After supper the family assembled on the porch and talked in a desultory
way until ten o'clock, when the lights were put out and the house
retired to rest. Eugenia slept in a great, four-post bedstead with Aunt
Chris, and the bed was so large and soft and billowy that she seemed to
lose herself suddenly at night in its lavender-scented midst, and to be
as suddenly discovered in the morning by Rindy, the house-girl, when she
came with her huge pails of warm water.

Those fresh summer dawns of Eugenia's childhood became among her dearest
memories in after years. There were hours when, awaking, wide-eyed,
before the house was astir, she would rise on her elbow and look out
across the dripping lawn, where each dewdrop was charged with opalescent
tints, to the western horizon, where the day broke in a cloud of gold.
The song of a mocking-bird in the poplars of the little graveyard came
to her with unsuspected melody--a melody drawn from the freshness, the
loneliness, the half-awakened calls from hidden nests and the lyric
ecstasy of dawn.

Then, with the rising of the sun, Aunt Chris would turn upon her pillow
and open her soft, brown eyes.

"It is not good for little folks to be awake so early," she would say,
and there would rush upon the child a sense of warmth and tenderness and
comfort, and she would nestle closer to her sweet, white pillow. With
the beginning of day began also the demands upon the time of Miss Chris.
First the new overseer, knocking at her door, would call through the
crack that a cow had calved, or that one of the sheep was too ill to go
to pasture. Then Rindy, entering with her pails, would shake a
pessimistic head.

"Lawd, Miss Chris, one er dem ole coons done eat up er hull pa'cel er
yo' chickens." And Miss Chris, at once the prop and the mainstay of the
Battle fortunes, would rise with anxious exclamations and put on her
full black skirt and linen sacque.

When breakfast was over Miss Chris went into the storeroom each morning
and came out with a basin of corn-meal dough, followed by Sampson
bearing an axe and Aunt Verbeny jingling the hen-house keys. The slow
procession then filed out to the space before the hen-house, the door of
which was flung back, while Aunt Verbeny clucked at a little distance.
Miss Chris scattered her dough upon the ground and, while her
unsuspecting beneficiaries made their morning meal, she pointed out to
Sampson, the executioner, the members of the feathered community
destined to be sacrificed to the carnivorous habits of their fellow
mortals.

"Feel that one with the black spots, Sampson," she said with the
indifference of an abstract deity. "Is it fat? And the domineca pullet,
and the two roosters we bought from Delphy."

And when Sampson had seized upon the victims of the fiat she turned to
inspect the bunches of fowls offered by neighbouring breeders.

To-day it was Nicholas Burr who stood patiently in the background, three
drooping chickens in each hand, their legs tied together with strips of
a purple calico which Marthy was making into a dress for Sairy Jane.

Seeing that Miss Chris had delivered her judgments, he came forward and
proffered his captives with an abashed demeanour.

"How much are they worth?" asked Miss Chris in her cheerful tones, while
Aunt Verbeny gave a suspicious poke beneath one of the flapping wings,
followed by a grunt of disparagement.

Nicholas stammered confusedly:

"Ma says the biggest ought to bring a quarter," he returned, blushing as
Aunt Verbeny grunted again, "and the four smallest can go for twenty
cents."

But when the bargain was concluded he lingered and added shamefacedly:
"Won't you please let that red-and-black rooster live as long as you
can? I raised it."

"Why, bless my heart!" exclaimed Miss Chris, "I believe the child is
fond of the chicken."

Eugenia, who was hovering by, burst into tears and declared that the
rooster should not die.

"Twenty cents is s-o ch-ea-p for a li-fe," she sobbed. "It shan't be
killed, Aunt Chris. It shall go in my hen-h-ou-se." And she rushed off
to get her little tin bank from the top bureau drawer.

When the arrangements were concluded Nicholas started empty-handed down
the box walk, the money jingling in his pocket. At the end of the long
avenue of cedars there was a wide, unploughed common which extended for
a quarter of a mile along the roadside. In spring and summer the ground
was white with daisies and in the autumn it donned gorgeous vestments of
golden-rod and sumach. In the centre of the waste, standing alike grim
and majestic at all seasons, there was the charred skeleton of a
gigantic tree, which had been stripped naked by a bolt of lightning long
years ago. At its foot a prickly clump of briars surrounded the
blackened trunk in a decoration of green or red, and from this futile
screen the spectral limbs rose boldly and were silhouetted against the
far-off horizon like the masts of a wrecked and deserted ship. A rail
fence, where a trumpet-vine hung heavily, divided the field from the
road, and several straggling sheep that had strayed from the distant
flock stood looking shyly over the massive crimson clusters.

When Nicholas came out from the funereal dusk of the cedars the field
was almost blinding in the morning glare, the yellow-centred daisies
rolling in the breeze like white-capped billows on a sunlit sea. From
the avenue to his father's land the road was unbroken by a single
shadow--only to the right, amid the young corn, there was a solitary
persimmon tree, and on the left the gigantic wreck stranded amid the
tossing daisies.

The sun was hot, and dust rose like smoke from the white streak of the
road, which blazed beneath a cloudless sky.

The boy was tired and thirsty, and as he tramped along the perspiration
rose to his forehead and dropped, upon his shoulder. With a sigh of
satisfaction he came upon the little cottage of his father and saw his
stepmother taking the clothes in from the bushes where they had been
spread to dry. It was Saturday, and ironing day, and he hoped for a
chance at his lessons before night came, when he was so tired that the
facts would not stick in his brain. He thought that it must be very easy
to study in the mornings when you were fresh and eager and before that
leaden weight centred behind your eyeballs.

When Marthy Burr saw him she called irritably:


"I say, Nick, did they take the chickens?"

Nicholas nodded, and, crossing the weeds in the garden, gave her the
money from his pocket.

"They didn't say nothing 'bout wantin' more, I 'spose? Did you tell 'em
I was fattenin' them four pairs of ducks?"

Nicholas shook his head. No, he hadn't told them.

"Well, your pa wants you down in the peanut field. You'd better get a
drink of water first. You look powerful red."

An hour later, when work was over, he carried his book to the orchard
and flung himself down beneath the trees. The judge had given him a
biography of Jefferson, and he had learned his hero's life with lips and
heart. The day that it was finished he put the volume under his arm and
went to the rector's house.

"I want to join the church," he said bluntly.

The rector, a kindly, middle-aged man, with a love for children, turned
to him in half-puzzled, half-sympathetic inquiry.

"You are young, my child," he replied, "to be so zealous a Christian."

"'Tain't that, sir," said the boy slowly. "I don't set much store by
that. But I've got to go to heaven--because I can't see Thomas Jefferson
no other way."

The rector did not smile. He was wiser than his generation, for he left
the great man's own religion to himself and God. He said merely:

"When you are older we shall see, my boy--we shall see."

Nicholas left with a chill of disappointment, but as he passed along the
street his name was called by Juliet Burwell, and she fluttered across
to him in all her mystifying flounces and her gracious smile.

"I was at the rector's," she said, "and he told me that you wanted to be
confirmed--and I want you to come into my Sunday-school class."

Nicholas met the kind eyes and blushed purple. Her beauty took away his
breath and made his pulses leap. The slow, musical drawl of her speech
soothed him like the running of clear water. He felt the image of Thomas
Jefferson totter upon its pedestal, but it was steadied with a
tremendous lurch. Jefferson was a man, after all, and this was only a
woman.

"Will you come?" asked the soft voice, and he stammered an amazed and
awkward assent.




VIII


On the Saturday after the day upon which Nicholas had pledged himself to
attend Sunday-school Juliet Burwell asked him to come into Kingsborough
and talk over the lesson for the following morning. At five o'clock in
the afternoon he dressed himself with trembling hands and a perturbed
heart; and for the first time in his life turned to look at his
reflection in the small, cracked mirror hanging above the washstand in
his stepmother's room.

As a finishing touch Marthy Burr tied a flaming plaid cravat beneath his
collar.

"You ain't much on looks," she remarked as she drew back to survey him,
"but you've got as peart a face as I ever seed. I reckon you'll be
plenty handsome for a man. I was al'ays kind of set against one of these
pink an' white men, somehow. They're pretty enough to look at when
you're feelin' first-rate, but when you git the neuralgy they sort of
turns yo' stomach. I've a taste for sober colours in men and caliky."

"I think he looks beautiful," said Sairy Jane, her eyes on the cravat,
and Nicholas felt a sudden glow of gratitude, and silently resolved to
save up until he had enough money to buy her a hair ribbon.

"I ain't sayin' he don't," returned Marthy Burr with a severe glance in
the direction of her eldest daughter, who was minding Jubal in the
kitchen doorway. "Thar's red heads an' red heads, an' his ain't no
redder than the reddest. But he came honestly by it, which is more than
some folks can say as is got yellow. His father had it befo' him, an'
thar's one good thing about it, you've got to be born with it or you
ain't goin' to come by it no other way. I never seed a dyer that could
set hair that thar colour 'cep'n the Lord Himself--an' I ain't one to
deny that the Lord has got good taste in His own line."

Then, as Nicholas took up his hat, she added: "If they ask after me,
Nick, be sure an' say I'm jes' po'ly."

Nicholas nodded and went out, followed to the road by Sairy Jane and
Jubal, while his stepmother called after him to walk in the grass and
try to keep his feet clean.

When he reached Kingsborough and crossed the green to the Burwell's
house, which was in the lane called "Back Street," he fell to a creeping
pace, held back by the fluttering of his pulses. Not until he saw Juliet
standing at the little whitewashed gate did he brace himself to the full
courage of approaching. When he spoke her name she opened the gate and
gave him her hand, while all sense of diffidence fell from him.

"I've been looking at you for a long ways," he said boldly, "an' you
were just like one of them tall lilies bordering the walk."

She blushed, turning her clear eyes upon him, and he felt a great desire
to kiss the folds of her skirt or the rose above her left temple. He had
never seen any one so good or so kind or so beautiful, and he vowed
passionately in his rustic little heart that he would always love her
best--best of all--that he would fight for her if he might, or work for
her if she needed it. There was none like her--not his stepmother--not
Sairy Jane--not even Eugenia. She was different--something of finer
clay, made to be waited upon and worshipped like the picture of the
goddess standing on the moon that he had seen in the judge's study.

Juliet smiled upon his ardour, and, leading him to a bench beneath a
flowering myrtle, made him sit down beside her, while she spoke pious
things about Adam and the catechism and the salvation of the world--to
all of which he listened with wide-opened eyes and a fluttering heart.
He wondered why no one had ever before told him such beautiful things
about God and the manifold importance of keeping a clean heart and
loving your neighbour as yourself. It seemed to him that he had been
living in sin for the twelve years of his life and he feared that he
should find it impossible to purge his mind of evil passions and to love
the coloured boy Boss who had stolen his best fishing line. He asked
Juliet if she thought he would be able to withstand the assaults of
Satan as the minister told him to do; but she laughed and said that
there was no Satan who went about like a roaring lion--only cruelty and
anger and ill-will, and that he must be kind to his brothers and
sisters, and to animals, and not rob birds' nests, which was very wrong.
Then she added as an afterthought, with a saintly look in her eyes, that
he must love God. He promised that he should try to do so, though he
wished in his heart that she had told him to love herself instead. As
he sat in the soft light, watching her beautiful face rising against a
background of lilies, his young brain thrilled with the joy of life. It
was such a glorious thing to live in a great, kind world, with a big,
beneficent God above the blue, and to love all mankind--not harbouring
an angry thought or an ill feeling! He looked into the kind eyes beside
him and felt that he should like to be a saint or a minister--not a
lawyer, which might be wicked after all. Then he remembered the
waxen-faced, choleric clergyman of the church his stepmother attended,
but he put the memory away. No, he would not be like that; he would not
preach fire and brimstone from a white-pine pulpit. He would be large
and just and merciful like God; and Juliet Burwell would come to hear
him preach, looking up at him with her blue, blue glance. In the
meantime he would not rob that marsh hen's nest which he had found. He
would never steal another egg. He wished that he didn't have that
drawerful at home. He would give them to Sairy Jane if she wanted
them--all except the snake's egg, which he might keep, because serpents
were an accursed race. Yes, Sairy Jane might have them all, and he
wouldn't pull her hair again when he caught her looking at them on the
sly.

Presently Juliet called Sally and took him into the quaint old
dining-room and gave him cakes and jam on a table that shone like glass.
There he saw Mr. Burwell--a pink-cheeked, little gentleman who wore an
expansive air of innocence and a white piqué waistcoat--and Mrs.
Burwell, a pretty, gray-haired woman, who ruled her husband with the
velvet-pawed despotism which was the heritage of the women of her race
and day. She had never bought a bonnet without openly consulting his
judgment; he had never taken a step in life without unconsciously
following hers.

"Really, my dear Sally," he had said when he heard of Nicholas's
reception by his daughter, "Juliet must a--a--be taught to recognise the
existence of class. Really, I cannot have her bringing all these people
into my house. You must put a stop to it at once, my dear."

Mrs. Burwell had smiled placidly as she patted her gray fringe.

"Of course you know best, Mr. Burwell," she had replied with that
touching humility which forbade her to address her husband by his
Christian name. "Of course you know best about such matters, and I'll
tell Juliet what you say. Poor child, she has such confidence in your
judgment that she will believe whatever you say to be right; but she
does love so to feel that she is exerting a good influence over the
boys, and, perhaps, helping them to work out their future salvation. She
thinks, too, that it is so well for them to have a chance of talking to
you. I heard her tell Dudley Webb that he must take you for an
example--"

"Ah!--ahem!" said Mr. Burwell, who worshipped the ground his daughter
trod upon. "I suppose it would be a pity to interfere with her, eh, my
dear?"

"Well, I can't help wishing myself, Mr. Burwell, that she would select
children of her own class in life, but, as you say, she has taken a
fancy to that Burr boy, and he seems to be a decent, respectful kind of
child. Of course I know it is your soft heart that makes you look at it
in this way--but I love you all the better for it. I remember the day
you proposed to me for the sixth time, I had just seen you bandage up
the head of a little darkey that had cut himself--and I accepted you on
the spot."

"Yes, yes, my love," Mr. Burwell had responded, kissing his wife as they
left the room. "I am convinced that I am right, and I am glad that you
agree with me. We won't speak of it to Juliet."

In the hall below they met Nicholas Burr, and greeted him with
hospitable kindness.

"So this is your new scholar, eh, Juliet? You must do justice to your
teacher, my boy."

Juliet laughed and went out into the yard to meet several young men who
were coming up the walk, and Nicholas noticed with a jealous pang that
she sat with them beneath the myrtle and talked in the same soft voice
with the same radiant smile. She was not speaking of heaven now. She was
laughing merrily at pointless jokes and promising to embroider a
handkerchief for one and to make a box of caramels for another.

He knew that they all loved her, and it gave him a miserable feeling. He
felt that they were unworthy of her--that they would not worship her
always and become ministers for her sake, as he was going to do. He even
wondered if it wouldn't be better, after all, to become a prize fighter
and to knock them all out in the first round when he got a chance.

In a moment Juliet called him to her side and laid her hand upon his
arm. "He has promised not to rob birds' nests and to love me always,"
she said.

But the young men only laughed.

"Ask something harder," retorted one. "Any of us will do that. Ask him
to stand on his head or to tie himself into a bow knot for your sake."

Nicholas reddened angrily, but Juliet told the jester to try such
experiments himself--that she did not want a contortionist about. Then
she bent over the boy as he said good-bye, and he went down the walk
between the lilies and out into the lane.

He recrossed the green slowly, turning into the main street at the
court-house steps. As he passed the church, a little further on, the
iron gate opened and the rector came out, jingling the heavy keys in his
hand as he talked amicably to a tourist who followed upon his heels.

"Yes, my good sir," he was saying in his high-pitched, emphatic
utterance, "this dear old churchyard is never mowed except by living
lawn-mowers. I assure you that I have seen thirty heads of cattle upon
the vaults--positively, thirty heads, sir!"

But the boy's thoughts were far from the church and its rector, and the
words sifted rapidly through his brain. He touched his hat at the
tourist's greeting and smiled into the clergyman's face, but his actions
were automatic. He would have nodded to the horse in the street or have
smiled at the sun.

As he passed the small shops fronting on the narrow sidewalk and
followed the whitewashed fence of the college grounds until it ended at
the Old Stage Road, he was conscious of the keen, pulsating harmony of
life. It was good to be alive--to feel the warm sunshine overhead and
the warm dust below. He was glad that he had been born, though the idea
had never formulated itself until now. He would be very good all his
life and never do a wicked thing. It was so easy to be good if you only
wanted to. Yes, he would study hard and become learned in the law, like
those old prophets with whom God spoke as man with man. Then, when he
had grown better and wiser than any one on earth, his tongue would
become loosened, and he would go forth to preach the Gospel, and Juliet
would listen to him for his wisdom's sake. Oh, if she would only love
him best--best of all!

This evening the road through the wood did not frighten him, though the
sun was down. He thought neither of the ghosts that Uncle Dan'l had
seen, nor of the bug-a-boos that had chased Viney's husband home. He was
too old for these things now. He had grown taller and stronger in a day.
When he reached the pasture gate opposite the house he opened it and
went in to look for the sheep.

The west was fast losing colour, like a bright-hued fabric that has been
drenched in water, and a thick, blue mist, shot with fireflies, shrouded
the wide common. A fresh, sharp odour rose from the dew-steeped earth,
giving place, as he gained upon the flock, to the smell of moist wool.
As he brushed the heavy, purple tubes of Jamestown weeds long-legged
insects flew out and struck against his arm before they fell in a
drunken stupor to the grass below.

The boy made his way cautiously, his figure becoming blurred as the
mist wrapped him like a blanket. The darkness was gathering rapidly.
From the far-off horizon clouds of lavender were melting, and the pines
had gone gray.

Presently a white patch glimmered in the midst of the pasture, and he
began to call softly:

"Coo-sheep! Coo-sheep!"

A tremulous bleat answered, but as he neared the flock it scattered
swiftly, the errant leaders darting shyly behind the looming outlines of
sassafras bushes. Again he called, and again the plaintive cry
responded, growing fainter as several fleeter ewes sped past him to the
beech trees beside the little stream.

The space before the boy was suddenly spangled with fireflies, and the
mist grew denser.

He broke off a branch of sassafras and started at a brisk run, rounding
by some dozen yards the startled ewes. The scattered white blotches
closed together as he ran towards them, and fled, bleating, to the flock
where it clustered at the pasture gate.

In a moment he had driven them across the road and behind the bars of
the cow-pen.

When he entered the house a little later he found that the family had
had supper, a single plate remaining for himself. His stepmother,
looking jaded and nervous, was putting salted herring to soak in an
earthenware bowl, while she scolded Sairy Jane, who was patching Jubal's
apron.

"It's goin' on ten years sence I've stopped to draw breath," said Marthy
Burr, "an' I'm clean wore out. 'Tain't no better than a dog's life,
nohow--a woman an' a dog air about the only creeturs as would put up
with it, an' they're the biggest pair of fools the Lord ever made. Here
I've been standin' at the tub from sunrise to sunset, with my jaw a'most
splittin' from my face, an' thar's yo' pa a-settin' at his pipe as
unconsarned as if I wa'nt his lawful wife--the more's the pity! It's the
lawful wives as have the work to do, an' the lawfuller the wives the
lawfuller the work. If this here government ain't got nothin' better to
do than to drive poor women till they drop I reckon we'd as well stop
payin' taxes to keep it goin'."

Nicholas wiped his heated brow on his shirt-sleeve and hung his hat on
the back of a bottomless chair. Jubal, who was rolling on the floor,
gave a gurgle and made a grab at it, to be soundly boxed by his mother
as she reseated him at Sairy Jane's feet. His gurgle wavered dolorously
and rose into a howl.

"Have you been to supper, ma?" asked Nicholas cheerfully.

"Lord, Nick, it's a long ways past supper-time," answered Sairy Jane,
relieved by the interruption. "The things air all washed up, ain't they,
pa?"

Amos Burr scowled heavily upon the boy's head, his phlegmatic nature
goaded into resentment by his wife's ill-temper and the lamentations of
Jubal.

"I don't reckon you expect supper to keep waitin' till breakfast," he
said. "You've given your ma trouble enough 'thout makin' her do an extra
washin' up on your o'count. You've gone clean crazy sence you've been
loafin' round with them Battles. I don't see as you air much o'count,
nohow."

Nicholas raised his eyes to his father's face and looked at him
fixedly. For a moment he did not speak, and then he said slowly:

"I'm as good as a hand to you."

He was thinking doggedly that he had never hated any one so much as he
hated his own father, and that he liked the sensation. He wished he
could do him some real harm--hit him hard enough to hurt or make the
peanuts rot in the ground. He should like also to choke Jubal, who never
left off yelling.

Amos Burr spat a mouthful of tobacco juice through the open window,
flinching before the boy's steady glance. He was a mild-natured man at
best, whose chief sin was his softness. It would not have entered his
slow-witted head to protest against the accusations of his wife. When
they stung him into revolt he revolted in the opposite direction.

But his failures were faults in his son's eyes. To the desperate
determination of the boy, weakness became as contemptible as crime. What
was a man worth who worked from morning until night and yet achieved
nothing? Of what account was the farmer whom the crows outwitted and the
weather made a mockery? Did not the very crops cry out as they rotted
that his father was a fool, and the unploughed land proclaim him a
coward? Had he ever dared a venture in his life or risked a season? And
yet what had ever returned at his bidding or brought forth at his
planting?

"You've been mighty little use of late," repeated Amos Burr stubbornly
when his wife placed the earthenware bowl on the shelf and came to the
table--her arm outstretched.

"Now, you jes' take yourself right off, Amos Burr," she said. "If you
can't behave decently to my dead sister's child you shan't hang round
them as was her own flesh and blood kin. Sairy Jane, you bring that
plate of hot corn pones from the stove. Here, Nick, set right down an'
eat your supper! There's some canned cherries if you want 'em."

Nicholas sat down, but the cornbread stuck in his throat and the coffee
was without aroma. He looked at the figured oilcloth on the table and
thought of the shining glass and silver at Juliet Burwell's. The flavour
of the cake she had given him seemed to intensify his distaste for the
food before him. He felt that he cared for nobody--that he wanted
nothing. He looked at his stepmother and thought that she was dried and
brown like a hickory nut; he looked at Sairy Jane and wondered why she
didn't have any eyelashes, and he looked at Jubal and saw that he was
all gums.

When he went up to his little attic room after supper he sat on his
shucks pallet in the darkness and thought of all the evil that he should
like to do. He should like to pull Sairy Jane's plait and to slap Jubal.
He should even like to tell Juliet Burwell that he didn't want to keep a
clean heart, and to call God names. No, he would not become a minister
and preach the Gospel. He would be a thief instead and break into
hen-houses and steal chickens. If his father planted watermelons he
would steal them from the vines as soon as they were ripe. Perhaps
Eugenia would help him. At any rate he would go halves with her if she
would be his partner in wickedness. He had just as soon go to hell,
after all--if it were not for Thomas Jefferson.

He leaned his head on his hands and looked through the narrow window to
where the peanut fields lay in blackness. From the stable came the faint
neigh of the old mare, and he remembered suddenly that he had forgotten
to put straw in her stall and to loosen her halter that she might lie
down. He rose and stole softly downstairs and out of the house.




IX


One evening in late autumn Nicholas went into Delphy's cabin after
supper and found Eugenia seated upon the hearth, facing Uncle Ish and
Aunt Verbeny. Between them Delphy's son-in-law, Moses, was helping
Bernard mend a broken hare trap, while Delphy, herself, was crooning a
lullaby to one of her grandchildren as she carded the wool which she had
taken from a quilt of faded patchwork. On the stones of the great
fireplace the red flames from lightwood splits leaped over a smouldering
hickory log, filling the cabin with the penetrating odour of burning,
resinous pine. From the wall above the hearth a dozen roasting apples
were suspended by hemp strings, and as the heat penetrated the russet
coats the apples circled against the yawning chimney like small globes
revolving about a sun.

Eugenia was sitting silently in a low, split-bottomed chair, her hands
folded in her lap and her animated eyes on the dark faces across from
her, over whose wrinkled surfaces the dancing firelight chased in ruddy
lights and shadows.

Uncle Ish had stretched his feet out upon the stones, and the mud
adhering to his rough, homemade boots was fast drying before the blaze
and settling in coarse gray dust upon the hearth. His gnarled old palms
lay upward on his knees, and his grizzled head was bowed upon his chest.
At intervals he muttered softly to himself, but his words were
inaudible--suggested by some far-off and disconnected vision. Aunt
Verbeny was nodding in her chair, arousing herself from time to time to
give a sharp glance into the face of Uncle Ish.

"Huccome dey let you out ter-night, honey?" asked Delphy suddenly,
turning her eyes upon Eugenia as she drew a fresh handful of wool from
between the covers of the quilt.

"I ran away," replied the child gravely. "I saw Bernard with his hare
trap, and Bernard shan't do nothin' that I can't do."

"Yes, I shall," rejoined Bernard without looking up from his trap. "You
can't wear breeches."

"I like to know why I can't," demanded Eugenia. "I put on a pair of your
old ones and they fit me just as well as they do you--only Aunt Chris
made me get out of them."

"Sakes er live!" exclaimed Aunt Verbeny, awaking from her doze.

Uncle Ish stared dreamily into the flames. "Ole Miss wuz in her grave,
she wuz," he muttered, while Delphy looked at him and shook her head
mysteriously.

Then, as Nicholas entered, they made a place for him upon the
hearthstones, treating him with the forbearing tolerance with which the
well-born negro regards the low-born white man.

"Pa wants you all to help him in peanut-picking to-morrow," said
Nicholas, addressing the group indiscriminately. "He's late at it this
year, but he's been laid up with rheumatism."

"Dar ain' nuttin' ez goes on two foot er fo' ez won' len' er han' at a
pickin'," remarked Uncle Ish as the boy sat down. "Dar ain' nuttin' in
de shape, er man er crow ez won't he'p demse'ves w'en dey's lyin' roun'
loose, nuther."

"Dar's gwine ter be er killin' fros' fo' mawnin'," said Moses, his teeth
chattering from the draught let in by the opening door. "Hit kilt all
Miss Chris' hop vines las' year, en it'll kill all ez ain't under kiver
ter-night. Hit seems ter sort er lay holt er yo' chist en clean grip
hit."

"You ain' never had no chist, nohow," remarked Delphy disdainfully. "Hit
don't take mo'n er spit er fros' ter freeze thoo you. You de coldest
innered somebody I ever lay eyes on. Dar mought ez well be er fence rail
er roun' on er winter night fer all de wa'mth ez is in yo' bones."

"Dat's so," admitted Moses shamefacedly. "Dat's so. Dese yer nights,
when de fire is all gone, is moughty near ter freezin' me out er house
en home. I ain' never seed ne'r quilt ez wuz made fur er hull fambly
yit. Wid me ter pull en Betsey ter pull en de chillun ter pull, whar de
quilt?"

"Dar ain' no blankets dese days," said Uncle Ish sadly. "Dey ain' got
mo'n er seasonin' er wool in dese yer sto' stuff. Dey wa'nt dat ar way
in ole times, sis Verbeny. Bless yo' soul, sis Verbeny, dey wan't dat ar
way."

"Ole Miss she use ter have eve'y stitch er her wool carded fo' her own
eyes," said Aunt Verbeny. "What wa'nt good enough fer her wuz good
enough fer de res', en we got hit. Ef'n de briars wouldn't come out'n it
soon ez she laid her han' on 'em, Ole Miss she turnt up her nose en
thowed de wool on ter de niggers' pile. Hit had ter be pisonous white
en sof fo' hit 'ud tech Ole Missusses skin. Noner yo' nappy stuff done
come near her."

Uncle Ish chuckled and hung his head on his breast.

"Doze wuz times!" he cried, "doze wuz times, en dese ain't times!"

Then he looked at Nicholas, who was watching the apples spinning in the
heat.

"De po' white trash ain' set foot inside my do'," he added, "en de
leetle gals ain' flirt roun' twell dar wa'nt no qualifyin' der legs f'om
der arms."

"I don't care!" said Eugenia, looking defiantly at Uncle Ish.

"Lor', chile, don't teck on dat way," remonstrated Aunt Verbeny. "You
ain't had no raisin' noways, en dar ain' been nobody ter brung you up
'cep'n yo' pa. Hit's de foolishness uv Miss Chris ez has overturnt de
hull place."

"She's a-settin' moughty prim now," continued Uncle Ish, his eyes on the
little girl. "She des' es prim es ef she wuz chiny en glass, but I'se
had my eye on 'er afo' dis. I'se done tote 'er in dese arms when she
wa'nt knee high ter Marse Tom's ole mule Jenny, en she ain't cut nairy
er caper dat I ain't 'sperienced hit."

"I don't care," retorted Eugenia.

"Ain't I done see her plump right out whar sis Delphy wuz a-wallopin'
her Jeetle nigger Jake, en holler out dat Jake ain' done lay ban's on
her pa's watermillion--'case she done steal 'em herse'f?"

"I don't care!" repeated Eugenia with tearful defiance.

"An' she ain' no mo' steal dat ar watermillion den I is," finished
Uncle Ish triumphantly.

"It was just a lie," said Bernard. "Eugie, you know where liars go."

"Des' ez straight ter de bad place ez dey kin walk," added Aunt Verbeny
severely. "Des' ez straight ez de Lord kin sen' 'em dar."

"It was a good lie," declared Nicholas, in manful defence of the weak.
"I don't believe she's goin' to be damned for a good lie and a little
one, too."

"Well, dar's lies en dar's lies," put in Delphy consolingly, "an' I 'low
dat dar's mo' in de manner uv lyin' den in de lie. Some lies is er long
ways sweeter ter de tas' den Gospel trufe. Abraham, he lied, en it ain't
discountenance him wid de Lord. Marse Tom, he lied when he wuz young, en
it spar'd 'im er whoppin'. Hit's er plum fool ez won't spar' dere own
hinder parts on er 'count uv er few words."

"George Washington didn't," said Bernard.

"I wish he had," added Eugenia. "Aunt Chris made me read about him and
his old cherry tree when I told her the red rooster was setting, because
I didn't want her to kill him."

"Ma asked me once if I had been fishin' when she told me to clean out
the spring," said Nicholas thoughtfully, "an' I said yes."

"What did she say?" asked Bernard.

"Nothin'. She whacked me on the head."

Just then Betsey came in with her baby in her arms, and Moses shuffled
aside to give place to her, cowed by an admonishing glance from his
mother-in-law.

"Bless de Lord!" exclaimed Uncle Ish, lifting his withered, old hands.
"Ef dar ain' anur er Betsey's babies! How many is de, Mose?"

Moses scratched his head and shrank into the corner.

"I ain' done straighten 'em out yit, Unk Ish," he returned slowly.
"'Pears like soon es I done add 'em all up anur done come, an' I has ter
kac'late f'om de bottom agin. I ain' got no head fer figgers, nohow.
Betsey, she lays dat dar's ten uv 'em, but ter save my soul I can't mek
out mo'n eight."

"Dar's nearer er dozen," rejoined Betsey with offended pride, "dar's
nearer er dozen 'cordin' ter de way I count."

"Dar now!" cried Aunt Verbeny. "I ain' never trus' no nigger's
cac'lations yit, en I ain' gwine ter now. When I wants countin', I want
white folks' countin'."

"Dey tell me," said Delphy, glancing sternly at the head on Betsey's
knee, "dat de quality don' set demse'ves up on er pa'sel er chillun no
mo'. De time done gone by. My Mahaly, she went up ter some outlandish
place wid er wild Injun name, like Philadelphy, en she sez de smaller de
fambly de mo' stuck up is de heads er it. She sez ef Ole Miss had gone
up dar a-puttin' on airs 'case er her fifteen chillun, she wouldn't
never have helt up 'er head no mo'. Mahaly, she ain' mah'ed no man, she
ain't. She sez en ole maid in Philadelphy des' looks right spang over
all de heads, she's so sot up."

"'Tain' so yer," said Aunt Verbeny feelingly. "'Tain' so yer. Hit seems
like de 'oman nairy a man is laid claim ter ain' wuth claimin'. Ain' dat
so, bro' Ish?"

But Uncle Ish only grunted in retort, his head nodding drowsily. The
tremulous tracery the wood-fire cast upon his face gave it an expression
of dumb intensity which adumbrated all the pathos and the patience of
his race.

"Mahaly wuz er likely gal," went on Aunt Verbeny, "an' when she las'
come home, she wuz a-warin' spike-heeled shoes en er veil uv skeeter
nettin'. 'Tain' so long sence Rhody's Viney went to Philadelphy, too,
but she ain' had no luck sence she wuz born er twin. Hit went clean agin
'er."

"Lord a-mercy, Aunt Verbeny, she ain't a-comin' back dis way?" asked
Betsey, probing the apples with a small pine stick and giving the
softest to Eugenia.

Aunt Verbeny shook her head.

"She ain' never had no luck on er 'count er bein' er twin," she said.
"When she sot herse'f on a-gwine up ter de Yankees, Marse Tom, he tuck
er goose quill en wrote out 'er principles [recommendations] des' es
plain es writin' kin be writ--which ain't plain enough fer my eyes--en
he gun' 'em ter Viney wid his own han's. Viney tuck 'n put 'em safe 'way
down in de bottom uv 'er trunk en went 'long ter de Yankees. But she
ain' been dar mo'n er week when one night she went a-traipsin' out on de
street en lef er principles behint 'er, en, bless yo' life, oner dem ar
Yankees breck right in en stole 'em smack 'way f'om 'er. Yo' trunk is a
moughty risky place ter kyar yo' principles, but Viney, she wuz dat sot
up."

A nod of assent passed round the group. The children ate their apples
silently, and Moses got up to put fresh wood on the fire. As the green
log fell among the smouldering chips vivid tongues of flame shot up the
smoked old mortar of the chimney, and the remaining apples burst their
brown peels and sent out little rivulets of juice. The crackling of the
fresh bark made a cheerful accompaniment to the chirping of a cricket
hidden somewhere in the hearthstones.

"Dar now, bro' Ish!" exclaimed Aunt Verbeny, watching Eugenia as she sat
in the dull red glare. "Ef dat chile ain't de patt'en er young Miss
Meeley, I'se clean cracked in my head, I is. I 'members Miss Meeley des'
ez well ez 'twuz yestiddy de day Marse Tom brung her home en de niggers
stood a-bowin' en axin' howdy at de gate. She wuz all black en white en
cold lookin' twell she smiled, en den it wuz des' like er lightwood
blaze in 'er eyes."

Uncle Ish nodded dreamily.

"I use ter ride erlong wid Marse Tom ter co'te 'er," he said, "en de
gent'men wuz a-troopin' ter see her in vayous attitudes. Dey buzzed
roun' 'er de same ez bees, but she ain' had no eyes fer none 'cep'n
Marse Tom."

At that instant the door opened, and Rindy rushed in, breathlesly
pursuing Eugenia.

"Miss Chris is pow'ful riled," she announced, "an' Marse Tom is
a-stampin' roun' same ez er bull. I reckon you'se gwine ter ketch it
when dey once gits dere han's on you." Then, as her eye fell on
Nicholas, she assumed an indignant air. "Dis ain't de place fer po'
folks," she added.

Eugenia rose and put a roasted apple in her pocket.

"I ain't goin' to catch anything that Bernard doesn't catch," she said.
"When he goes I'm goin' too."

And she went out, followed by Rindy and the boys.

The first breath of the chill atmosphere brought a glow to Nicholas's
cheek, and he started at a brisk run across the fields. He had gone but
a few yards when he was checked by Eugenia's voice.

"Nick!" she called.

Her small, dark shadow was falling on the ground beside him, and by the
light of the pale moon he could see the fog of her breath.

As he went towards her she held out her hand.

"Here's an apple I saved for you," she panted. "And--and I don't mind
about your being poor white trash!"

He took the apple, but before the reply left his lips she had darted
from him and was speeding homeward across the glimmering whiteness of
the frost.





BOOK II

A RAINY SEASON




I


Mrs. Jane Dudley Webb was a lady who supported an impossible present
upon an important past. She had once been heard to remark that if she
had not something to look back upon she could not live: and, as her
retrospective view was racial rather than individual, the consolation
attained might be considered disproportionate to the needs of the case.
The lines of her present had fallen in a white frame house in the main
street of Kingsborough; those of her past began with the first Dudley
who swung a lance in Merry England, to end with irascible old William of
the name, who slept in the family graveyard upon James River.

Mrs. Webb herself was straight and elegant, and inclined to the
ironical, when, as Jane Dudley, the belle of the country-side, she fired
the fancy of young Julius Webb, an officer in the cavalry of the United
States. He danced a minuet with her at a ball in Washington, was heard
to swear an oath by her eyes at punch before the supper was over; and
proceeded the following week to spur his courtship upon old William as
daringly as he had ever spurred his horse upon an Indian wigwam.

The last Dudley of the Virginian line withstood, through several stormy
years, the united appeals of his daughter and her lover. In the end he
yielded, subdued by opposition and gout, retaining the strength to
insert but a single stipulation in the marriage contract, to the effect
that his daughter should drop the name of Jane and be known as Dudley in
her husband's household. To this the dashing bridegroom acquiesced with
readiness, and when, within a year of the wedding, his wife presented
him with a son, he called the boy, as he called the mother, by her
maiden name.

He was a jovial young buck, who lived in his cards and his cups and
loathed a quarrel as he loved a fight.

When the war between the States arose he went with Virginia, caring
little for either cause, but conscious that his heart was where his home
was. So he kissed the young mother and the boy at her side and rode
lightly away with a laugh upon his lips, to fall as lightly in the mad
charge of cavalry at Brandy Station.

When the news came Jane Dudley listened to it in silence, her hands
clasping the worsteds she was winding. After the words were spoken she
laid the worsteds carefully aside, stooping to pick up a fallen ball.
Then she crossed the room and went upstairs.

She said little, refusing herself alike to consolation and to
acquaintances, spending her days in the shuttered house with her boy
beside her. When he fretted at the restraint she tied a band of crêpe on
his little jacket and sent him to play on the green, while she took up
her worsteds again and finished the muffler she had been crocheting. If
she wept it was in secret, when the lights were out.

Some years later the house was sold over her head, but when she stood,
penniless, upon the threshold it was to cross it as haughtily as she had
done as a bride. The stiff folds of her black silk showed no wavering
ripple, the repose of her lips betrayed no tremor. The smooth, high
pompadour of her black hair passed as proudly beneath the arched doorway
as it had done in the days of her wifehood and Julius Webb.

Her neighbours opened their wasted stores to her need, and out of their
poverty offered her abundance, but she put aside their proffered
assistance and undertook, unaided, the support and education of her
child, maintaining throughout the struggle her air of unflinching irony.
She moved into a small white frame house opposite the church, and let
out her spare rooms to student boarders. Her pride was never lowered and
her crêpe was never laid aside. She sat up far into the night to darn
the sleeves of her black silk gown, but the stitches were of such
exquisite fineness that in the dim light of her drawing-room they seemed
but an added gloss.

From behind the massive coffee urn at the head of her table she regarded
her boarders as so many beneficiaries upon her bounty. When she passed a
cup of coffee she seemed to confer an honour; when she returned a
receipted bill it was as if she repulsed an insult. People said that she
had been born to greatness and that she had never adapted herself to the
obscurity that had been thrust upon her--but they said it when her back
was turned. To her face the subject was never broached, and her former
prosperity was ignored along with her present poverty. Of her own
sorrows she, herself, made no mention. When she spoke from the depths of
her bitterness of the war and the ruin it had left, her resentment was
general rather than personal. Above the mantel in her room hung the
sword of Julius Webb, sheathed under the tattered colours of the
Confederate States. At her throat she wore a button that had been cut
from a gray coat, and, once, after the close of the war, she had pointed
to it before a Federal officer, and had said: "Sir, the women of the
South have never surrendered!" The officer had looked at the face above
the button as he answered: "Madam, had the women of the South fought its
battles, surrender would have been for the men of the North." But Jane
Webb had smiled bitterly in silence. To her the Federal officer was but
an individual member of a national army of invasion, and the rights of
the victors, the wrongs of Virginia.

Her neighbours regarded her with almost passionate pride--rebuking their
more generous natures by the sight of her unbowed beauty and her
solitary revolt. When young Dudley grew old enough to attend school the
general and the judge called together upon his mother and offered, with
hesitancy, to undertake his education.

"He is only a year or two older than my Tom," began the judge, tripping
in his usually steady speech. "I assure you it will give me pleasure to
have the boys thrown together."

Mrs. Webb bowed in unaffirmative fashion.

"On my life, ma'am, I can't forget that Julius Webb fell at Brandy
Station," put in the general hotly. "Your husband died for Virginia, and
your boy shall not want while I have a penny in my pocket. I'll send him
to college with Bernard, and feel it to be a privilege!"

Mrs. Webb bowed again.

"A great privilege, ma'am," protested the general, uneasily.

Mrs. Webb smiled.

"The greatest privilege of my life, ma'am!" cried the general, his face
flushing and his eyes growing round with agitation.

In the end they gained their point, and Mrs. Webb consented, but with a
reluctance of reserve which caused the general to choke with
embarrassment and the judge to become speechless from perplexity. When
they rose to leave both thanked her with effusion and both bowed
themselves out as gratefully as if it were a royal drawing-room and they
had received the honours of knighthood.

"She is a remarkable woman!" exclaimed the general, wiping his eyes on
his white silk handkerchief as they descended the steps. "A most unusual
woman! Why, I feel positively unworthy to sit in her presence. Her
manner brings all my past indiscretions to mind. It is an honour to have
such a character in the community, sir!"

The judge acquiesced silently.

The interview had tried his Epicurean fortitude, and he was wondering if
it would be necessary to repeat the call before Christmas.

"If Julius Webb had lived she would have made a man of him," continued
the general enthusiastically, the purple flush slowly fading from his
flabby face. "A creature who could live with that woman and not be made
a man of wouldn't be human; he'd be a hound. There is dignity in every
inch of her, sir. I will allow no man to question my respect for our
immortal Lee--but if Jane Webb had been the commander of our armies, we
should be standing now upon Confederate soil--"

"Or upon the ashes of it," suggested the judge, adding apologetically,
"she is indeed a woman in a thousand."

He held it to be a lack of courtesy to dissent from praise of any woman
whose chastity was beyond impeachment, as he held it to be an absence of
propriety to unite in admiration of one who was wanting in the supremest
of the feminine virtues. His code was an obvious one, and he had never
seen cause to depart from it.

"I hope the boy will be worthy of her," he said. "It is a good name that
he bears."

The general took off his straw hat and mopped his brow.

"Worthy of her!" he exclaimed. "He's got to be worthy of her, sir. If he
takes any notion in his head not to be, I'll thrash him within an inch
of his life. Let him try it, the young scamp!"

The judge laughed easily, having regained his self-possession. "Well,
well, there's no telling," he said; "but he's as bright as a steel trap.
I wish Tom had half his sense." Then he turned past the church on his
way home, and the general, declining an invitation to dinner, went on to
the post-office, where he awaited his carriage.

From this time Dudley Webb attended classes at the judge's house and
became the popular tyrant of his little schoolroom. He was a dark,
high-bred looking boy, with a rich voice and a nature that was generous
in small things and selfish in large ones. There was a convincing air of
good-fellowship about him, which won the honest heart of slow-witted Tom
Bassett, and a half-veiled regard for his own youthful pleasures, which
aroused the wrath of Eugenia.

"I can't abide him," she had once declared passionately to Sally
Burwell. "Somehow, he always gets the best of everything."

When, after the first few years, Nicholas Burr entered the schoolroom
and took his place upon one of the short green benches, Mrs. Webb called
upon the judge in person and demanded an explanation.

"My boy has been carefully brought up," she said; "he is a gentleman,
and he will not submit to association with his inferiors. His
grandfather would not have done so before him."

The judge quailed, but it was an uncompromising quailing--a surrender of
the flesh, not the spirit.

"My dear lady," he began in his softest voice, "your son is a fine,
spirited fellow, but he is a boy, and he doesn't care a--a--pardon me,
madam--a continental whether anybody else is his inferior or not. No
wholesome boy does. He doesn't know the meaning of the word--nor does
Tom--and I shan't be the one to teach him. Amos Burr's son is a clever,
hard-working boy, and if he will take an education from me, he shall
have it."

The judge was firm. Mrs. Webb was firm also.

The judge assumed his legal manner; she assumed her hereditary one.

"It is folly to educate a person above his station," she said.

"Men make their stations, madam," replied the judge.

He sat in his great arm-chair and looked at her with reverent but
determined eyes. His head was slightly bent, in deference to her
dissenting voice, and his words wavered, but his will did not. In his
attitude his respect for her sexually and individually was expressed,
but he had argued the opposing interests in his mind, and his decision
was judicial.

"I am deeply pained, my dear lady," he said, "but I cannot turn the boy
away."

Mrs. Webb did not reply. She gathered up her stiff skirt and departed
with folded lips.

After she had gone the judge paced his study nervously for a half-hour,
giving uncertain glances towards the hall door, as if he expected the
advent of an incarnate thunderbolt. In the afternoon he sent over a
bottle of his best Madeira as a peace-offering. Mrs. Webb acknowledged
the Madeira, not the truce. The following day General Battle called upon
the judge and requested in half-hearted tones the withdrawal of Amos
Burr's son. He looked excited and somewhat alarmed, and the judge
recognised the hand of the player.

"My dear Tom Battle," he said soothingly, "you do not wish the poor
child any harm."

"'Fore God, I don't, George," stammered the general.

"He's a quiet, unoffending lad."

The general fingered his limp cravat with agitated plump fingers. "I
never passed him on the road in my life that he didn't touch his hat,"
he admitted, "and once he took a stone out of the gray mare's shoe."

"He has a brain and he has ambition. Think what it is to be born in a
lower class and to have a mind above it."

The general's great chest trembled.

"I wouldn't injure the little chap for the world George; on my soul, I
wouldn't."

"I know it, Tom."

"My own great-grandfather Battle raised himself, George."

The judge waved the fact aside as insignificant.

"Of course, Mrs. Webb is a woman," he said with sexual cynicism, "and
her views are naturally prejudiced. You can't expect a woman to look at
things as coolly as we do, Tom."

The general brightened.

"'Tisn't nature," he declared. "You can't expect a woman to go against
nature, sir."

"And Mrs. Webb, though an unusual woman (the general nodded), is still a
woman."

The general nodded again, though less emphatically.

"On my soul, she's wonderful!" he exclaimed. "Why, damme, sir, if I had
that woman to brace me up I shouldn't need a julep."

And the judge, flinching from his friend's profanity, called Cæsar to
bring in the decanters.

Some time later the general left and Mr. Burwell appeared, to be met
and dispatched by the same arguments.

"Naturally my instincts prompt me to side with an unprotected widow,"
said Mr. Burwell.

"No Virginian could feel otherwise," admitted the judge in the slightly
pompous tone in which he alluded to his native State.

"But as I said to my wife," continued Mr. Burwell with convincing
earnestness, "these matters had best be left to men. There is no need
for our wives and daughters to be troubled by them. It is for us, who
are acquainted with the world and who have had wide experience, to
settle all social barriers."

The judge agreed as before.

"I am glad to say that my wife takes my view of it," the other went on.
"Indeed, I think she has expressed what I have said to Mrs. Webb."

"Your wife is an honour to her sex," said the judge, bowing.

Then Mr. Burwell left, and the judge spent another half-hour walking up
and down his study floor. He had gained the victory, but he would have
felt pleasanter had it been defeat. It was as if he had taken some
secret advantage of a woman--of a widow.

But the future of Amos Burr's son was sealed so far as it lay in the
judge's power to settle with circumstances, and each morning during the
school term Mrs. Webb frowned down upon his hurrying figure as it sped
along the street and turned the corner at the palace green. Sometimes,
when snow was falling, he would shoot by like an arrow, and Dudley would
say with quick compassion, as he looked up from his steaming cakes:
"It's because he hasn't any overcoat, mother. He runs to keep warm."

But Mrs. Webb's placid eyes would not darken.

When the boys grew too old for school Tom and Dudley went to King's
College for a couple of years, while Nicholas returned to the farm. The
judge still befriended him, and the contents of Tom's class books found
their way into his head sooner or later, with more information than
Tom's brain could hold. One of the instructors at the college--a
consumptive young fellow, whose ambitions had leaned towards the
bar--gave the boy what assistance he needed, and when the work of the
class-room and the farm was over, the two would meet in the dim old
library of the college and plod through heavy, discoloured pages, while
the portraits of painted aristocrats glowered down upon the intrusive
plebeian.

Despite the hard labour of spring ploughing and the cold of early winter
dawns, when he was up and out of doors, the years passed happily enough.
He beheld the future through the visions of an imaginative mind, and it
seemed big with promise. Sitting in the quaint old library, surrounded
by faded relics and colourless traditions, he felt the breath of hushed
oratory in the air, and political passion stirred in the surrounding
dust. There was a niche in a small alcove, where he spent the spare
hours of many a day, the words of great, long-gone Virginians lying
before him; behind him, through the small square window, all the
blue-green sweep of the college grounds ending where the Old Stage Road
led on to his father's farm.

He plodded ardently and earnestly, the consumptive young instructor
following his studies with the wistful eyes of one who sees another
striving where he has striven and failed. The students met him with
tolerant hilarity, and Tom Bassett, who would have kicked the
Declaration of Independence across the campus in lieu of a ball, watched
him with secret mirth and open championship. There had sprung up a
strong friendship between the two--one of those rare affections which
bend but do not break. Dudley Webb, the most brilliant member of his
class and the light of his mother's eyes, began life, as he would end
it, with the ready grasp of good-fellowship. He had long since outgrown
his artificial, childish distrust of Nicholas, and he had as long ago
forgotten that he had ever entertained it. As for Nicholas himself, he
had not forgotten it, but the memory was of little moment. He had a work
to do in life, and he did it as best he might. If it were the ploughing
of rocky soil, so much the worse; if the uprooting of dead men's
thoughts, so much the better. He slighted neither the one nor the other.

As he grew older he became tall and broad of chest, with shoulders which
suggested the athlete rather than the student. His hair had darkened to
a less flaming red, his eyes had grown brighter, and the freckles had
faded into a general gray tone of complexion.

"He will be the ugliest man in the State," said Mr. Burwell, inflating
his pink cheeks, with a return of youthful vanity, "but it is the
ugliness that attracts."

Nicholas had not heard, but, had he done so, the words would have left
a sting. He possessed an inherent regard for physical perfection,
rendered the greater by his own tormented childhood. He was strong and
vigorous and of well-knit sinews, but he would have given his muscle for
Dudley Webb's hands and his brains for the other's hair.

Once, as a half-grown boy, in a fit of jealousy inspired by Dudley's
good looks, he had called him "Miss Nancy," and knocked him down. When
his enemy had lain at his feet on the green he had raised him up and
made amends by standing motionless while Dudley lashed him with a small
riding-whip. The jealousy had vanished since then, but the smart was
still there.

At last the college days were over. Dudley was sent to the university of
the State; Tom Bassett and Bernard Battle soon followed, and Nicholas,
still plodding and still hopeful, was left in Kingsborough.

Then, upon his nineteenth birthday, the judge, who had left the bench
and resumed his legal practice, sent for him and offered to take him
into his office while he prepared himself for the bar.




II


When Nicholas descended the judge's steps he lingered for a moment in
the narrow walk. His head was bent, and the books which he carried under
his arm were pressed against his side. They seemed to contain all that
was needed for the making of his future--those books and his impatient
mind. His success was as assured as if he held it already in the hollow
of his hand--and with success would come honour and happiness and all
that was desired of man. It seemed to him that his lot was the one of
all others which he would have chosen of his free and untrammelled will.
To strive and to win; to surmount all obstacles by the determined dash
of ambition; to rise from obscurity unto prominence through the sheer
forces that make for power--what was better than this?

Still plunged in thought, he passed the church and followed the street
to the Old Stage Road. From the college dormitories a group of students
sang out a greeting, and he responded impulsively, tossing his hat in
the air. In his face a glow had risen, harmonising his inharmonious
features. He felt as a man feels who stands before a closed door and
knows that he has but to cross the threshold to grasp the fulness of his
aspiration. Yes, to-day he envied no one--neither Tom Bassett nor Dudley
Webb, neither the general nor the judge. He held the books tightly
under his arm and smiled down upon the road. His clumsy, store-made
boots left heavy tracks in the dust, but he seemed to be treading air.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon of a murky day in early November,
and the clouds were swollen with incoming autumnal rains. The open
country stretched before him in monotonous grays, the long road gleaming
pallid in the general drab of the landscape. As he passed along, holding
his hat in his hand, his uplifted head struck the single, high-coloured
note in the picture--all else was dull and leaden.

A farmer driving a cow to market neared him, and Nicholas stopped to
remark upon the outlook. The farmer, a thick-set, hairy man, whose name
was Turner, gave a sudden hitch to the halter to check the progress of
the cow, and nodded ominously.

"Bad weather's brewin'," he said. "The wind's blowin' from the
northeast; I can tell by the way that thar oak turns its leaves. It's a
bad sign, and if thar ain't a-shiftin' 'fore mornin', we're likely to
hev a spell."

Nicholas agreed.

"There hasn't been much rainfall lately," he added. "I reckon it has
come at last and for a long stretch." His eyes swept the western
horizon, where the clouds hung heavily above the pines.

"Yo' pa got his crops in?"

"Pretty much. The peanuts were harvested after the last frost."

"He ain't had much luck this year, I hear."

Nicholas shook his head.

"No less than usual. Last year he lost the brindle cow that was
calving. This season the mare died."

"Well, well! He never was much for luck, nohow. Seems like he worked too
hard to have Providence on his side. I allers said that Providence had
ruther you'd leave a share of the business to Him. Got through school
yet?"

"Yes; I'm reading law."

"Reading what?"

"I am going to study law in the judge's office--Judge Bassett, you
know."

"So you can keep a tongue in yo' head when those plagued cusses come
'bout the mortgage?"

"So I can take cases to court and earn a living."

"Why don't you stick to the land and make yo' bread honest?"

"The law's honest."

Turner shook his hairy head.

"It cheated me out o' twelve bushels of 'taters las' year," he said.
"Don't tell me 'bout yo' law. I know it."

Nicholas laughed.

"Come to me when I've set up, if you get in trouble," he rejoined, "and
I'll get you out."

The cow gave a lunge at the ropes, and the farmer went on his way. When
the man and cow had passed from sight Nicholas stopped and laughed
again. He wondered if he could be really of one flesh and blood with
these people--of one stuff and fibre. What had he in common with his own
father--hard-working, heavy-handed Amos Burr? No, he was not of them and
he had never been.

He had turned from the main road into the wood, when a girl on
horseback dashed suddenly towards him from the gray perspective. She was
riding rapidly, her short skirts flying, her hair blown darkly across
her face. A brown-and-white pointer ran at her side.

As she caught sight of Nicholas she half rose in her saddle, giving a
loud, clear call.

"Hello, Nick Burr! Hello!"

Nicholas stood aside and waited for her to come up, which she did in a
moment, panting from her exercise, her face flushing into a glowing
heat.

"I was looking for you," she said, waving a small willow spray in her
brown hand. "I went by the farm, but you weren't there. So, you are
nineteen to-day!" Her eyes shone as she looked at him. There was a
singular brilliance of expression in her face, due partly to the
exercise, partly to the restless animation of her features. She was at
the unbecoming age when the child is merging into the woman, but her
lack of grace was redeemed by her warmth of personality.

Nicholas laid his hand upon the bridle.

"Why, Genia, if I'd known you wanted me I'd have been hanging round
somewhere. What is it?"

"Let me look at you."

Nicholas flushed, turning his face away from her.

"God knows, I'm ugly enough," he said.

She leaned nearer, shaking back her straight, black hair, which fell
from beneath the small cap.

"I want to see if you have changed since yesterday."

He turned towards her.

"Have I?" he asked hopefully.

She regarded him gravely, though a smile played over her changeful lips.

"Not a bit. Not a freckle."

"Hang it all! I lost my freckles long ago."

"Then they've come back. There are one--two--three on your nose."

"Hold on! Let my looks alone, please."

Eugenia whistled softly, half grave, half gay.

"Down, darling!" she said to the pointer, and "be still, beauty!" to the
horse. Then she turned to Nicholas again.

"I've really and truly got something to tell you, Nick Burr."

"Out with it, then. Don't worry."

She swung her long legs idly from the saddle. "Suppose I don't."

"Then don't."

"Suppose I do."

"I'll be hanged if I care!"

"Oh, you do, you story. You're just dying to know--but it's serious."

She patted the horse's neck, watching Nicholas with child-like
eagerness.

"Well, I'm--I'm--there! I told you you were dying to know!"

"I'm not."

"Guess, anyway."

"Somebody coming on a visit?"

She shook her head.

"Try again, stupid."

"Miss Chris going to be married?"

"Oh, Lord, no. You aren't really a fool, Nick."

"Betsey got a baby?"

"Why, Tecumsey only came last June!"

"Then I give it up. Tell me."

"Say please."

"Please, Genia!"

"Say 'please, dear, good Genia.'"

"Please, dear, darling Genia."

"I didn't say 'darling.' I said 'good.'"

"It's the same thing."

She smiled at him with boyish eyes.

"Am I really a darling?"

"Do you really know something?"

"You bet I do."

"What is it?"

She laughed teasingly.

"It'll make you cry."

"Hurry up, Genia!"

"You'll certainly cry very loud."

"I'll shake you in a moment."

"It isn't polite to shake ladies."

"You aren't a lady. You're a vixen."

"Aunt Verbeny says I'm a limb of Satan. But will you promise not to weep
a flood of tears, so I can't cross home?"

She leaned still nearer, resting her hand upon his shoulder.

"I'm going away."

"What?"

"I'm going away to-morrow at daybreak. I'm going to school. I shan't
come back for a whole year. I'm--I'm going to leave papa and Aunt Chris
and Jim and you."

She began to sob.

"Don't," said Nicholas sharply.

"And--and you don't care a bit. You're just a stone. Oh, I don't want to
go to school!"

"I'm not a stone. I do care."

"No, you don't. And I may die and never come back any more, and you'll
forget all about me."

"I shan't. Don't, I say. Do you hear me, Genia, don't."

She looked for a handkerchief, and, failing to find one, wiped her eyes
on the horse's mane.

"What are you going to do when I am gone?"

"Work hard so you'll be proud of me when you come back."

"I shall be sixteen in two years."

"And I, twenty-one."

"You'll be a man--quite."

"You'll be a woman--almost."

"I don't think I shall like you so much then."

"I shall like you more."

"Why?" she asked quickly.

"Why? Oh, I don't know. Am I so awfully ugly, Genia?"

"Turn this way."

He obeyed her, flushing beneath her scrutiny.

"I shouldn't call you--awful," she replied at last.

"Am I so ugly, then?"

"Honour bright?"

"Of course," impatiently.

"Then you are--yes--rather."

He shook his head angrily.

"I didn't think you'd be mean enough to tell me so," he returned.

"But you asked me."

"I don't care if I did. You might have said something pleasant."

Her sensitive mouth drooped. "I never think of your being ugly when I'm
with you," she said. "It's a good, strong kind of ugliness, anyway. I
don't mind it."

He smiled again.

"Looks don't matter, anyway," she went on soothingly. "I'd rather a man
would be clever than handsome;" then she added conscientiously, "only
I'd rather be handsome myself."

He looked at her closely.

"I reckon you will be," he said. "Most women are. It's the clothes, I
suppose."

Eugenia looked down at him for an instant in silence; then she held out
her hands.

"I am going at daybreak," she said. "Will you come down to the road and
tell me good-bye?"

"Why, of course."

"But we must say good-bye now, too. Did we ever shake hands before?"

"No."

"Then, good-bye. I must go."

"Good-bye, dear--darling."

She touched her horse lightly with the willow, but promptly drew rein,
regarding Nicholas with her boyish eyes.

"Do you think it would make it any easier if we kissed?" she asked.

"Geriminy! I should say so!"

He caught her hands; she leaned over and he kissed her lips. She drew
back with the same frank laugh, but a flush burned his face and his
eyes were sparkling.

"More, Genia," he said, but she laughed and let the bridle fall.

"No--no--but it made me feel better. There, good-bye, dear, dear Nick
Burr, good-bye!"

Then she dashed past him, and a whirl of dust filled the solitary air.

He looked after her until she turned her horse into the Old Stage Road,
and the clatter of the hoofs was gone. When the stillness had fallen
again he went slowly on his way.

In the woods the pale bodies of the beeches seemed to melt into the
cloudy atmosphere. There was no wind among the trees, and the pervading
dampness had robbed the yellowed leaves of their silken rustle. They
fluttered softly, hanging limp from the drooping branches as if attached
by invisible threads. As he went on a deep bluish smoke issued from
among some far-off poplars where a farmer was burning brush in a
clearing. The smoke hung low above the undergrowth, assuming eccentric
outlines and varied tones of dusk. Presently the fires glimmered nearer,
and he saw the red tongues of the flames and heard the parched crackling
of consuming leaves. The figures of the workers were limned grotesquely
against the ruddy background with a startling and unreal absence of
detail. They looked like incarnate shadows--stalking between the dim
beeches and the blazing brush heaps. A few drops of rain fell suddenly,
and the fires began slowly to die away. At the foot of the crumbling
"worm" fence, skirting the edges of the wood, deep wind-drifts of
russet leaves stirred mournfully. Later they would be hauled away to
assist in the winter dressing of the fallows; now they beat helplessly
against the retarding rails like a vanquished army of invasion.

Nicholas left the wood and passed the field of broomsedge on his way to
the house. Beyond the barnyard he saw the long rows of pine staves that
had supported the shocks of peanuts, and from the direction of the field
he caught sight of his father, driven homeward by the threatening rain.

Sairy Jane, who was bringing a string of dried snaps from the outhouse,
called to him to hurry before the cloudburst. She was a lank, colourless
girl, with bad teeth and small pale eyes. Jubal, at the churn in the
hall, rested from his labours as Nicholas entered, and grinned as he
pointed to his mother in the kitchen. Marthy Burr was ironing. As
Nicholas crossed the threshold, she stopped in her passage from the
stove and looked at him, a flash of pride softening her pain-scarred
features.

"Lord, what a man you are, Nick!" she exclaimed with a kind of triumph.
"When I heard yo' step on the po'ch I could have swo'ed it was yo'
pa's."

Nicholas nodded at her abstractedly as he took off his hat.

"Where's pa?" he asked carelessly. "I thought he'd have got in before
me. I saw him as I came up."

"I reckon he won't git in befo' he gits a drench-in'," responded his
stepmother, glancing indifferently through the back window. "If he does
it'll be the first time sence he war born. 'Twarn't nothin' to be done
in the fields, nohow, an' so I told him, but he ain't never rested yet,
an' I don't reckon he's goin' to till I bury him."

As she spoke the rain fell heavily, and presently Amos Burr came in,
shaking the water from his head and shoulders.

"I told you 'twarn't no use yo' goin' to the fields befo' the rain,"
began his wife admonishingly. "But you're a man all over, an' it seems
like you're 'bliged to go yo' own way for the sheer pleasure of goin'
agin somebody else's. If I'd been pesterin' you all day long to go down
thar to look at that ploughin', you'd be settin' in yo' chair now, plum
dry."

Amos Burr crossed to the stove and turned his dripping back to the heat.

"Gimme a rubbin' down, Sairy Jane," he pleaded, and his daughter took a
dry cloth and began mopping off the water.

Marthy Burr placed an iron on the stove and took one off.

"Whar'd you git dinner, Nick?" she inquired suddenly.

"At the judge's."

"What did they have?" demanded Jubal from the hall, ceasing the clatter
of the churn. "Golly! Wouldn't I like a bite of something!"

"I shouldn't mind some strange cookin', myself," said Marthy Burr,
shaking her head at one of the children who had come into the kitchen
with muddy feet. "I ain't tasted anybody else's vittles for ten years,
an' sometimes I feel my mouth waterin' for a change of hand in the
dough."

She took one of her husband's shirts from the pile of freshly dried
clothes, spread it on the ironing-board, and sprinkled it with water.
Then she moistened her finger and applied it to the iron.

Amos Burr looked up from before the stove, where he still sat drying.

"You're a man now, Nick," he said slowly, as if the words had been
revolving in his brain for some time and he had just received the power
of speech.

"Yes, pa."

"Whatever he is, he don't git it from his pa," put in Marthy Burr as she
bent over the shirt. "He ain't got nothin' of yo'rn onless it's yo'
hair, an' that's done sobered down till you wouldn't know it."

Amos waited patiently until she had finished, and then went on heavily
as if the pause had been intentional, not enforced.

"You've got as much schoolin' as most city chaps," he said. "Much good
it'll do you, I reckon. I never saw nothin' come of larnin' yet, 'cep'n
worthlessness. But you'd set yo' mind on it, an' you've got it."

"Thar warn't none of yo' hand in that, Amos Burr," cried his wife,
checking him again before he had recovered breath from his last
sentence. "Many's the night I've wrastled with you till you war clean
wore out with sleeplessness, 'fo' you'd let the child keep on at his
books."

"I ain't never seen no good come of it," repeated Burr stolidly; then he
returned to Nicholas.

"I reckon you'll want to do somethin' for the family, now," he said,
"seein' yo' ma is well wore out an' the brindle cow died calvin', an'
Sairy Jane is a hard worker."

Nicholas looked at him without speaking.

"Yes?" he said inquiringly, and his voice was dull.

"I was talkin' to Jerry Pollard," continued his father, letting his slow
eyes rest upon his son's, "an' he said you war as likely a chap as thar
was roun' here, and he reckoned you'd be pretty quick in business."

"Yes?" said Nicholas again in the same tone.

Amos Burr was silent for a moment, and his wife filled in the pause with
a series of running interjections. When they were over her husband took
up his words.

"He wants a young fellow about his store, he says, as can look arter the
books an' the business. He's gittin' too old to keep up with the city
ways an' look peart at the ladies--he'll pay a nice little sum in cash
every week."

"Yes?" repeated Nicholas, still interrogatively.

"An' he wants to know if you'll take the place--you're jest the sort of
chap he wants, he says--somebody as will be bright at praisin' up the
calicky to the gals when they come shoppin'. Thar's nothin' like a young
man behind the counter to draw the gals, he says."

Nicholas shook his head impatiently, clasping the books tightly beneath
his arm. His gaze had grown harsh and repellent.

"But I am going into the judge's office," he answered. "I am going--"
Then he checked himself, baffled by the massive ignorance he confronted.

Amos Burr drew one shoulder from the fire and offered the other. A slow
steam rose from his smoking shirt, and the room was filled with the
odour of scorching cotton.

"Thar ain't much cash in that, I reckon," he said.

Nicholas took a step forward, still facing his father with obstinate
eyes. One of the books slipped from his arm and fell to the floor, with
open leaves, but he let it lie. He was watching his father's jaws as
they rose and fell over the quid of tobacco.

"No, there is not much cash in that," he repeated.

"Things have gone mighty hard," said Amos Burr. "It's been a bad year. I
ain't sayin' nothin' 'bout the work yo' ma an' Sairy Jane an' me have
done. That don't seem to count, somehow. But nothin' ain't come
straight, an' thar ain't a cent to pay the taxes. If we can't manage to
tide over this comin' winter thar'll have to be a mortgage in the
spring."

Sairy Jane began to cry softly. One of the children joined in.

"Give me time," said Nicholas breathlessly. "Give me time. I'll pay it
all in time." Then the sound of Sairy Jane's sobs maddened him and he
turned upon her with an oath. "Damn you! Can't you be quiet?"

It seemed to him that they were all closing upon him and that there was
no opening of escape.

Marthy Burr put down her iron and came to where he stood, laying her
hand upon his sleeve.

"Don't mind 'em, Nick," she said, and her sharp voice broke suddenly.
"Go ahead an' make a man of yo'self, mortgage or no mortgage."

Nicholas lifted his gaze from the floor and looked into his
stepmother's face. Then he looked at her hand as it lay upon his arm.
That trembling hand brought to him more fully than words, more clearly
than visions, the pathos of her life.

"Don't you worry, ma," he said quietly at last. "It'll be all right.
Don't you worry."

Then he let her hand slip from his shoulder and left the room.

He passed out upon the back porch and stood gazing vacantly across the
outlook.

It rained heavily, the drops descending in horizontal lengths like a
fantastic fall of colourless pine needles. Overhead the clouds were
black, impenetrable.

Through the falling rain he looked at the view before him, at the
overgrown yard, at the manure heaps near the stable, at the grim rows of
staves in the peanut field, at the sombre and deserted landscape. A raw
wind blew in gusts from the northeast, and the distorted ailanthus tree
in the yard moaned and wrung its twisted limbs. Sharp, unpleasant odours
came from the pig-pen in the barnyard, where the rain was scattering the
slops in the trough. A bull bellowed in a far-off pasture. Before the
hen-house door several dripping fowls strutted with wilted feathers.

He saw it all in silence, with the dogged eyes of one whose gaze is
turned inward. He made no gesture, uttered no exclamation. He was as
motionless as the lintel of the door on which he leaned.

Suddenly a gust of wind whipped the rain into his face. He turned,
reëntered the house, closed the door carefully, and went upstairs.




III


The next morning Nicholas went into the judge's study and declined the
offer of the day before.

"I shan't read law, after all," he said slowly. "There is a business
opening for me here, and I'll take advantage of it." He spoke in set
phrases, as if he had rehearsed the sentences many times.

"Business!" echoed the judge incredulously. "Why, what business is going
on in Kingsborough?"

Nicholas flushed a deep red, but his glance did not waver.

"Jerry Pollard wants me in his store, sir."

The judge removed his glasses, wiped them deliberately on his silk
handkerchief, put them on again, and regarded the younger man
attentively.

"And you wish to go into Jerry Pollard's store?" he inquired.

"I think it is the best thing I can do."

"The best paying thing, I presume?"

"Yes, sir."

"Bless my soul!" exclaimed the judge testily. "What is the world coming
to? I suppose Tom will be writing me next that he intends to keep a
stall in market. Well, you know best, of course. You may do as you
please; but may I ask if you are going to bargain in Latin and multiply
by criminal law in Jerry Pollard's store?"

"No, sir."

"Then, what in the--what in the--I really feel the need of a strong
expression--what in the world did you take the trouble to educate
yourself for?"

Nicholas was looking at the floor, and he did not raise his eyes. His
face was hard and set.

"Because I was a fool," he answered shortly.

"And now, if I may ask?"

"A fool still--but I've found it out."

The judge leaned back in his chair and tapped the ledge of his desk
meditatively.

"Have you fully decided?" he asked.

Nicholas nodded.

"I have thought it over," he said quietly.

"Then there's nothing to be done, I suppose. I hope the compensation
will satisfy you. Jerry Pollard is said to be somewhat tight-fisted, but
your business instincts may be equal to his acquirements. Now, I have a
number of letters, so, if you don't mind, I will bid you good-day."

He bowed, and Nicholas left the study and went out of the house.

Rain was still falling, and small pools of water had formed on the
palace green. Straight ahead the lane of maples stretched like a line of
half-extinguished fires, and the ground beneath was strewn with wet, red
leaves. The slanting sheets of rain gave a sombre aspect to the town--to
the time-beaten buildings along the unpaved streets and to the commons,
where the water stood in grassy hollows. Beneath the gray sky the scene
assumed a spectre-like suggestion of death and decay--the death of
laughter that seemed still to echo faintly from the vanished stones--the
decay of royal charters and of kingly grants. The very air was
reminiscent of a yesterday that was perished; the red, wet leaves
painted the brown earth in historic colours.

Nicholas turned the corner at the church and passed on to Jerry
Pollard's store--a long, low structure fronting on the main street--and
entered by a single step from the sidewalk. The show windows on either
side the entrance displayed a motley selection from the varied
assortment of a "general" store--cheap silks and high-coloured calicos,
men's shirts and women's shoes, cravats and hairpins, suspenders and
corsets. On the sidewalk near the doorway there was a baby carriage, a
saddle, and a collection of farming implements. As Nicholas crossed the
threshold a pink-cheeked girl passed him, her arms filled with bundles,
and at the counter an old negro woman was pricing red flannel.

Jerry Pollard, a coarse-featured, full-bearded man of sixty years, was
behind the counter. Nicholas caught his persuasive tones as he leaned
over, holding the end of the bolt of flannel in his hands.

"Now, look here, Aunty, you ain't going to find such a bargain as this
anywhere else in town. Take my oath on that. Every thread wool and
forty-four inches wide. Only thirty cents a yard, too. I got it at an
auction in Richmond, or I couldn't let it go at double that price. How
much? All right."

The flannel was measured off with skilful manipulations of the yardstick
and the scissors, the parcel was handed to the old negro woman, and the
change was dropped into the till. Then Jerry Pollard came from behind
the counter and slapped Nicholas upon the shoulder.

"Hello, my boy!" he said. "So your pa has taken me at my word, and here
you are. Well, Jerry Pollard's word's his bond, and he ain't going back
on it. So, when you feel like it, you can step right in and get to
business. When'll you begin? To-day? No time like the present time's my
motto."

"To-morrow!" returned Nicholas hastily. "I've got some things to wind
up. I'll come to-morrow."


"All right. I'm your man. To-morrow at seven sharp?"

Then a purchaser appeared, and Jerry Pollard went forward, his business
smile returning to his face.

The purchaser was Mrs. Burwell, and, as Nicholas passed out, she looked
up from a pair of waffle-irons she was selecting and nodded pleasantly.

"I am glad to see you, Nicholas," she said. "Juliet was asking after you
in her last letter. You were always a favourite of Juliet's. I was
telling Mr. Burwell so only last night."

"She was very kind," returned Nicholas, and added: "Is Miss Juliet--Mrs.
Galt well?"

Juliet Burwell had married five years before, and he had not seen her
since.

Mrs. Burwell nodded cheerily. She was still fresh and youthful, her pink
cheeks and bright eyes giving the gray of her hair the effect of powder
sprinkled on her brown fringe.

"Yes, Juliet is well," she answered. "They are living in Richmond now.
Mr. Galt had to give up his practice in New York because the climate did
not suit Juliet's health. I told him she couldn't stand transplanting to
the north, and I was right. They had to move south again. Yes, Mr.
Pollard, the middle-size irons, please. I think they'll fit my stove. If
they don't, I'll exchange them for the small ones. What did you say,
Nicholas? Oh! good-morning."

She turned away, and Nicholas stepped over her dripping umbrella and
went out into the rain.

When he was once outside he shook the water from his shoulders and
walked rapidly in the direction of the old brick court-house, isolated
upon the larger green. The door and windows were closed, but he ascended
the stone steps and stood beneath the portico, looking back upon the way
that he had come.

The street was deserted, save for a solitary ox-cart rolling heavily
through the mud. In the distance the gray drops made a sombre veil,
through which the foliage of King's College showed in a blurred
discolouration. From the branches of trees a double fall of water
descended with a melancholy sound.

Presently the ox-cart neared him, and the driver nodded, eyeing him with
apathetic interest.

When the cart had passed Nicholas came down the steps and started up the
street at the same rapid walk. He was not thinking of his way, but the
impulse of action had seized upon him, and he was walking down the
ferment in his brain. He did not formulate the thought that with bodily
fatigue would come mental indifference; he merely felt that when he was
tired--dead tired--he would go home and sit down to dinner and face his
father and discuss Jerry Pollard's terms. He would do that when he was
too tired to care--not before.

When he reached the heavy iron gate of the college he swung it open and
entered the grounds. In the centre of the walk stood the statue of a
great Colonial governor, and he paused before it for an instant, staring
up into the battered features of the marble face. He realised suddenly
that he had never looked at it before. Daily, for twelve years, he had
passed the college campus, sometimes crossing it so that he might have
brushed the effigy of the great Englishman with a careless hand--but he
had never seen the face before. Then he looked through the falling rain
at the deserted archway of the old brick building. For the first time
those grim walls, which had been thrice overthrown and had arisen thrice
from their ashes, impressed him with the triumphant service they had
rendered in the culture of his kind. He saw it as it was--a sacred
skeleton, an honourable decay. The long line of illustrious hands that
had procured its ancient charter seemed to wave a ghostly benediction
over its ancient learning. Clergy and burgesses, council and governor,
planters of Virginia and bishops of London had stood by its birth. It
was the fruit of the union of the old world and the new, and it had
waxed strong upon the milk of its mother ere it turned rebel. Later, to
its younger country, it had sent forth its sons as statesmen who gave
glory to its name. And through all its history it had overcome calamity
and defied assault. Thrice it had fallen and thrice it had rearisen.

He recalled next the sheltered alcove in the dim library, where he had
studied with the consumptive young instructor, who was dead. The
creepers upon the wall were encroaching stealthily upon the alcove
window. Scarlet tendrils, like forked flames, licked the narrow ledge.
Several wet sparrows fluttered in and out among the leaves.

He turned hastily away, passed the great Englishman with unseeing eyes,
clanged the iron gate heavily behind him, and went on towards the house
of his father.

The family were at dinner when he entered, and he took his seat silently
in the empty chair at his stepmother's right hand.

As he sat down she reached out and felt his coat sleeve.

"I declar, Nick, you air soaked clean through," she said. "Anybody'd
think you'd been layin' out in the rain all night. You go up and change
your clothes an' I'll keep your dinner hot on the stove."

Nicholas went upstairs mechanically, and when he came down his father
had gone to the stable and his stepmother was alone in the kitchen.

She brought him his dinner, standing beside the table while he ate it,
watching him with an intentness that was almost wistful.

"Would you like some molasses on your corn pone?" she asked as he
finished and pushed his plate away. Then, as he shook his head, she
added hesitatingly, "It come from Jerry Pollard's store."

But he only shook his head again, following with his eyes the wave-like
design on the mahogany-coloured oilcloth that covered the table.

Marthy Burr set the jug aside, nervously clearing her throat.

"I reckon Jerry Pollard has got one of the finest stores anywhar
'bouts," she said suddenly.

Nicholas looked up quickly and met her eyes. She was holding a dish of
baked potatoes in one hand and the other was resti

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